Do I really need a name for every resource?

[shibumi]

Hi,

I am new to Tanka so forgive me if I am just unable to get it right. Do I really need the name lokinamespace in this main.jsonnet file here?

local tanka = import "github.com/grafana/jsonnet-libs/tanka-util/main.libsonnet";
local helm = tanka.helm.new(std.thisFile);

{
    lokinamespace: {
		apiVersion: "v1",
		kind: "Namespace",
		metadata: {
			name: "loki"
		}
	},
    loki: helm.template("loki-stack", "../../charts/loki-stack", {
        namespace: "loki",
        values: {
            config: {
                table_manager: {
                    retention_deletes_enabled: true,
                    retention_period: "720h",
                },
            },
            persistence: {
                enabled: true,
                size: "30Gi",
            },
            ingress: {
                enabled: true,
                annotations: {
                    "kubernetes.io/ingress.class": "internal",
                },
                hosts: [{
                    host: "loki-k8s.FOOBAR.COM",
                    paths: ["/"],
                }
                ],
                tls: [],
            }
        }
    })
}

What I would like to do is something more anonymous like:

    {
		apiVersion: "v1",
		kind: "Namespace",
		metadata: {
			name: "loki"
		}
	},

Why do I want to achieve this? I think it's very annoying to constantly come up with fantasy resource names if it's really not needed. I just want to create a namespace for loki before installing the loki-stack helm chart.

[malcolmholmes]

That's just how Jsonnet works. It renders to JSON. Tanka then scans the resultant JSON for objects that have an apiVersion and a kind. So we somehow need to reference the object in the JSON - this could either be within a map (i.e. it needs a name) or in a list, in which case it doesn't.

However, using lists in Jsonnet makes life harder later on when we decide we want to adjust something after the fact. Having a JSON name means we can refer to the object easily, which makes a big difference.