I don't use templates for manifests and avoid them like the plague. I use my preferred language to emit manifests and built tooling around it. It does not temp

I don't use templates for manifests and avoid them like the plague. I use my preferred language to emit manifests and built tooling around it. It does not template, and instead generates the manifest by transforming a data structure (hash) into json. I can then use whatever language feature or library I need to generate that data structure. This is much easier to work with than trying to edit template files. I don't need to save the output of these because when I use the tooling, it generates and feeds that directly into kubectl. There's also a diff tool that works most of the time that lets me see what I am about to change before changing it. In fact, I ended up adding a wrapper for Helm so that I can have all the various --set and values, source chart, chart repo, chart version pinning all versioned in git, and use the same tooling to apply those with the flags to install things idempotently turned on by default. It sets that up and calls helm instead of kubectl. That tooling I wrote is open-source. You never heard of it because (1) I don't have the time and energy to document it or promote it, and (2) it only makes sense for teams that use that particular language. Helm is language-agnostic. EDIT: and reading this thread, someone mentioned Kustomize. If that had been around in '16, I might not have written my own tool. It looks like it also treat YAML manifests as something to be transformed rather than templates to be rendered.