Okteto deploy vs pipeline deploy

Hi okteto team,

I have a question about some of the CLI behaviour and the general intention behind some of the functions.

With a dependency, the deployment occurs on the server side. In other words, if my dependency repo contains a helm command in its manifest, the helm operation occurs on the server so there’s no need to have helm installed locally. But if the deploy section of okteto.yml in the current dir is a helm command, the okteto cli will invoke helm locally when you run okteto deploy, so helm needs to be installed.

But if you run okteto pipeline deploy then okteto will deploy the current repo and current branch on the server side, so with this command you don’t need helm locally - which is awesome.

So then is the idea behind okteto deploy that you are just targeting the deploy section of the manifest? Is this part of a pattern to target specific points of the manifest with okteto [manifest key]? And really the ‘proper’ workflow is to run okteto pipeline deploy so everything occurs server-side?

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Hi Willen, great question!
okteto deploy is intended for development. The idea is to avoid committing your code while you are iterating in your application. Today, okteto deploy runs the deploy commands locally. In the future, we would like to run them server-side too and send the local context via synchronization, but we don’t have an ETA for that yet.
If running commands locally becomes an issue in your setup, you can always run okteto pipeline deploy to run the deploy commands server side. There is a --branch flag for okteto pipeline deploy, but you have to commit your changes to apply them on okteto pipeline deploy

Thanks Pablo - that makes sense.

So when I run okteto pipeline deploy without any flags, it will deploy the current branch from the current repo - using the remote branch on the server. I understand it now, thanks.

One of the nice things about okteto deploy is that you can choose to rebuild the images, or you can choose to use the images which were already built.

This choice isn’t available in pipeline deploy yet, so we would be very keen to see the okteto deploy server-side functionality created so we had that functionality/choice on the server.

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