Replacements IgnoreMissingField

Eschewed features

[X] This issue is not requesting templating, unstuctured edits, build-time side-effects from args or env vars, or any other eschewed feature.

What would you like to have added?

include in FieldOptions a bool for IgnoreMissingField in order to apply replacements across many files, ignoring those, that don't have the field.

Why is this needed?

When using replacements as a reusable component across multiple manifests, especially in environmental overlays, a common pattern emerges. For example, certain elements like an accountId in an IRSA role annotation on a ServiceAccount often need to be replaced.

In cases where you have many ServiceAccount resources—such as N applications with M workloads and M ServiceAccounts—only X of those ServiceAccounts may require the annotation replacement, while others do not.

This approach ensures flexibility, allowing replacements to be applied only where needed, without enforcing unnecessary changes across all resources.

Can you accomplish the motivating task without this feature, and if so, how?

The task can be accomplished, but it requires more granular use of the replacement, targeting specific ServiceAccounts which can result in more complexity, code duplication, and errors.

What other solutions have you considered?

Pattern matching with regex on the target name so the replacement only applies to resources that match a specific name format.

Anything else we should know?

No response

Feature ownership

[X] I am interested in contributing this feature myself! 🎉

kubernetes-sigs / kustomize