Support Deletion or Renaming of APIs via CLI

[mike-weiner]

Feature Request

Describe the problem you need a feature to resolve.

I've been using operator-sdk recently to scaffold out a proof-of-concept operator. That iterative process has included a lot of renaming of controllers and CRDs.

Up to this point I've used operator-sdk init [flags] followed up with operator-sdk create api [flags] to create a new project and rename the APIs. I then manually copy + paste code from the old project to the new project. This makes source controlling things somewhat difficult.

Describe the solution you'd like.

After creating an API via operator-sdk create api [flags], it'd be great to have a operator-sdk delete api [flags] and/or operator-sdk rename api [flags] for folks that are iterating on their design and want an easy way to modify what they've already begun to create.

/language go

[aviralgarg05]

I would like to solve this issue

[manavrajvanshi]

Hi @aviralgarg05, are you actively working on this issue?

[aviralgarg05]

yes

[manavrajvanshi]

@mike-weiner did you figure out a way other than the manual copy-paste in the interim?
I'm currently relying on GPTs to do the grunt work, but that isn't sustainable.

[mike-weiner]

@manavrajvanshi - Nope. Unfortunately the only thing that I found was manual copy-paste in the interim. I actually found it easier while I was iterating to just scaffold out an entirely new project and re-create the CRDs with the changes I wanted.

But that clearly does not scale well.

[acornett21]

Since the init and create cmds come from kubebuilder, this would have to be implemented there first.

@camilamacedo86 is delete/rename something that kubebuilder has an issue for?

With that said, even if kubebuilder implements this, it's unlikely to get picked up here.

[manavrajvanshi]

@acornett21 I found this long standing issue on kubebuilder: kubernetes-sigs/kubebuilder#907.
There's also one WIP PR from @camilamacedo86 for it: kubernetes-sigs/kubebuilder#5352.

[openshift-ci]

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[camilamacedo86]

There's also one WIP PR from @camilamacedo86 for it: kubernetes-sigs/kubebuilder#5352.

I've been experimenting with that approach. I think we could introduce a delete subcommand and let plugins implement a corresponding interface. However, for commands like create api and create webhook, I don't think it's really feasible. It's extremely difficult to reliably ensure that we remove everything that was scaffolded, especially since those commands can modify multiple files in different ways.