Rustanka

The clean, concise and super flexible alternative to YAML for your Kubernetes cluster — now in Rust, and faster than ever before 🚀

Rustanka (rtk) is a drop-in replacement for Tanka (tk). It has replaced Tanka in production at Grafana Labs.

• ✨ Clean: The Jsonnet language expresses your apps more obviously than YAML ever did.
• 🏗️ Reusable: Build libraries, import them anytime and even share them on GitHub!
• 📌 Concise: Using the Kubernetes library and abstraction, you will never see boilerplate again!
• 🎯 Confidence: Stop guessing and use rtk diff to see what exactly will happen.
• 🔭 Helm: Vendor in, modify, and export Helm charts reproducibly.

Performance vs Tanka

rtk vs tk on Grafana Labs' CI benchmarks (sample run). Faster in every case, up to:

Command	Up to	Notes
eval	41× faster	Uses jrsonnet directly, which is much faster than go-jsonnet
export (full)	25× faster
export (replace)	32× faster
diff	51× faster	kubectl operations have been replaced with native Kubernetes API calls
tool importers	8× faster

Feature compatibility with Tanka

Status is relative to Tanka (tk). ✅ implemented, ❌ not implemented (including CLI stubs that exit with not implemented), ➖ not applicable.

Workflow commands

Feature	tk	rtk	Notes
apply	✅	✅
show	✅	✅
diff	✅	✅
prune	✅	✅
export	✅	✅
eval	✅	✅
lint	✅	✅	rtk lint uses jrsonnet-lint (--fix, --disable-checks)
env add / list / remove / set	✅	✅
delete	✅	❌	Tracking: #14
status	✅	❌	Tracking: #13
fmt	✅	❌	Tracking: #11
init	✅	❌	Tracking: #12
complete	✅	❌	Tracking: #15

Tools

Feature	tk	rtk	Notes
tool imports	✅	✅
tool imports --check	✅	❌	Tracking: #17
tool importers	✅	✅
tool charts (init, add, add-repo, vendor, config, version-check)	✅	✅
tool jpath	✅	❌	Tracking: #16
tool importers-count	✅	✅

Jsonnet natives and related features

Feature	tk	rtk	Notes
Helm templating (std.native('helmTemplate'))	✅	✅
Helm chart vendoring (tool charts)	✅	✅
Kustomize (std.native('kustomizeBuild'))	✅	✅
--jsonnet-implementation (go, binary:…, c++, reference)	✅	❌	Always uses built-in jrsonnet. Tracking: #23, #33, #34
spec.exportJsonnetImplementation	✅	➖	No-op: evaluation is always jrsonnet
jsonnet-bundler (jb)	➖	➖	External tool. Planned as rtk bundler: #27

Rustanka-only / planned

Feature	tk	rtk	Notes
validate	❌	✅	Policy checks against exported manifests
helm	❌	❌	Helm-like CLI wrapper. Tracking: #26
bundler	❌	❌	Built-in replacement for jb. Tracking: #27