Configure Resources with Reloader

Reloader uses a set of annotations to determine which resources need to be watched and correspondingly which resources need to be restarted if a change is detected.

Auto Detect Resources

Most commonly used annotation is reloader.stakater.com/auto: "true". This will discover all the secrets and configmaps which are used either via environment variable or from volume mount in the deploymentconfigs/deployments/daemonsets/statefulset/rollouts, and it will perform rolling upgrade on related pods when the watched resources are updated.

kind: Deployment
metadata:
  annotations:
    reloader.stakater.com/auto: "true"
spec:
  template:
    metadata:

Restrict Auto Discovery

You can restrict this discovery to only ConfigMap or Secret objects that are tagged with a special annotation. To take advantage of that, annotate your deploymentconfigs/deployments/daemonsets/statefulset/rollouts like this:

kind: Deployment
metadata:
  annotations:
    reloader.stakater.com/search: "true"
spec:
  template:

and Reloader will trigger the rolling upgrade upon modification of any ConfigMap or Secret annotated like this:

kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  annotations:
    reloader.stakater.com/match: "true"
data:
  key: value

provided the secret/configmap is being used in an environment variable, or a volume mount.

Reload on Specific Resources

To perform rolling upgrade when change happens only on specific configmaps or secrets, the annotation configmap.reloader.stakater.com/reload: "<secret1-name>/<configmap1-name>, <secret2-name>/<configmap2-name>" can be used, which works on comma-separated names of configmaps or secrets, if multiple.

If a Deployment called foo has a ConfigMap called foo-configmap and a secret called foo-secret. Then add this annotation to the metadata of your Deployment

kind: Deployment
metadata:
  annotations:
    configmap.reloader.stakater.com/reload: "foo-configmap,foo-secret"
spec:
  template:
    metadata:

More configurations in which Reloader can be used are mentioned in How to Use Reloader.