Deskription

Deskription is a project for Kubernetes that defines how UIs should render Kubernetes resources. Instead of hard-coding a table and a detail view for every resource kind, a UI (console, dashboard, IDE plugin, CLI) reads Deskription custom resources that describe how other resources should be displayed — and renders any kind, including custom resources, from that description.

The definitions are themselves Kubernetes resources (API group deskription.io, version v1alpha1), so they can be bundled with a UI as defaults and applied to a cluster to extend or update the rendering at any time, without changing the UI:

Kind	Purpose
Resource	Classifies a resource kind into a category (Workload, Storage, …)
ResourceTable	Columns a UI renders when listing resources of a kind
ResourceDetails	Fields a UI renders on the detail view of a single resource

apiVersion: deskription.io/v1alpha1
kind: ResourceTable
metadata:
  name: kubernetes-apps-v1-deployment
spec:
  selector:
    apiGroup: apps
    apiVersion: v1
    kind: Deployment
  columns:
    - name: Name
      path: metadata.name
    - name: Created
      type: datetime
      path: metadata.creationTimestamp

Definitions that match the same resource kind are merged: columns and fields override by name or are appended, so an extension can add a single column without restating the whole table.

Documentation

• Documentation — concepts, consumption model, and the full spec of all kinds
• schema/ — JSON schemas for editor completion and validation
• definitions/ — the bundled default definitions, organized as <distribution>/<group>/<version>/<Kind>.yaml

Validate the definitions against the schemas with:

python3 scripts/validate.py

Resource types

Every kind is classified by a Resource definition. The type is an open enum; known values:

• Workload — Pods, Deployments, Jobs, Knative services, etc.
• Storage — PersistentVolumes, PersistentVolumeClaims, StorageClasses, etc.
• Data — ConfigMaps, Secrets
• RBAC — Users, Groups, ServiceAccounts, etc.
• CICD — workflows like Builds, Pipelines, ImageStreams, etc.
• Compute — Nodes, Machines, MachineConfigs, etc.
• Network — Services, Routes, Ingresses, etc.
• Operators — PackageManifests, Subscriptions, CatalogSources, etc.

Bundled definitions

• Kubernetes (Docs)
  • core
    • Nodes
    • Pods
    • PersistentVolumes
    • PersistentVolumeClaims
    • ReplicationControllers
    • ConfigMaps
    • Secrets
    • ServiceAccounts
  • batch
    • Jobs
    • CronJobs
  • apps
    • DaemonSets
    • Deployments
    • ReplicaSets
    • StatefulSets
  • autoscaling
    • HorizontalPodAutoscalers
  • policy
    • PodDisruptionBudgets
  • storage
    • StorageClasses
    • VolumeSnapshots
    • VolumeSnapshotClasses
    • VolumeSnapshotContents
• Operators
  • CatalogSources
  • ClusterServiceVersions
  • Subscriptions
  • PackageManifests
• OpenShift
  • apps
    • DeploymentConfigs
  • autoscaling
    • MachineAutoscalers
  • build
    • Builds
    • BuildConfigs
  • image
    • ImageStreams
    • ImageStreamTags
  • machine
    • Machines
    • MachineHealthChecks
    • MachineSets
  • machineconfiguration
    • MachineConfigs
    • MachineConfigPools
  • user
    • Users
    • Groups
• Knative
  • serving
    • Services
    • Revisions
    • Routes
• Tekton
  • core
    • Pipelines
    • PipelineRuns
    • ClusterTasks
    • Tasks
    • TaskRuns
• Shipwright
  • core
    • Builds
    • BuildRuns