How to apply common annotations, labels, and transformations from base Kustomization in overlays that require new resources?

[x80486]

I'm trying to refactor some Kubernetes applications to make use of bases and overlays but I'm running into an issue where labels and annotations are not being applied correctly to some specific resource files.

Basically, I have a base configuration consisting of config-map.yaml, service.yaml, deployment.yaml, kustomization.yaml, and virtual-service.yaml. These files contain common configuration settings that apply to all environments. This is the base kustomization.yaml:

apiVersion: kustomize.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
commonAnnotations:
  key: value # Annotations that should be applied to all environments
namePrefix: app-name-
kind: Kustomization
labels:
  - includeSelectors: true
    includeTemplates: true
    pairs:
      key: value # Common labels that should be applied to all environments
resources:
  - config-map.yaml
  - deployment.yaml
  - service.yaml
  - virtual-service.yaml

I have one environment that doesn't require new resources — and everything works well. In another environment, where I need to add two additional configuration files: autoscaler.yaml and destination-rules.yaml, the labels, annotations, and some other transformations (e.g.: namePrefix) from the base kustomization.yaml are not being correctly applied to these additional files.

The kustomization.yaml for this environment looks like:

apiVersion: kustomize.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
commonAnnotations:
  annotations-for-this-specific-environment: value
kind: Kustomization
labels:
  - includeSelectors: true
    includeTemplates: true
    pairs:
      labels-for-this-specific-environment: value
patches:
  - patch: some-patch-file.yaml # Patches for some resources
resources:
  - ../base # I've tried referring to base before and after the additional files
  - autoscaler.yaml
  - destination-rules.yaml

Is there a way to resolve this issue? It looks like a pretty common use case 🤔

I did try using components as well, but I've got exactly the same output.

[sda399]

Your transformers are not global, and are applied to the resources they are declared with (your base/).
For common transformers, I would probably extract then into Components instead, then include them for each overlay.

There are some examples/use cases of Components in the documentation