Run pre-deploy job only on source changes, not on reconcile interval

[dan0sh]

Hello Flux team 👋

What I want to achieve:

I'm using the pre-deploy job with Flux’s Kustomization. At the moment, this job runs on every reconciliation, regardless of whether the reconcile was triggered by the .spec.interval (periodic sync) or by a source change (e.g., new Git commit, image update).

Desired behavior:

• The pre-deploy job should execute only when there is a source change (such as a new Git revision or updated image).
• If the reconcile happens solely due to the periodic interval, with no source changes detected, the job should be skipped.

Why this matters

Certain jobs—such as database migrations, schema updates, or data seeding—are meaningful only when the application’s source has changed. Running these jobs on every reconcile cycle, even without changes, can:

• introduce unnecessary load,
• increase operational noise,
• and in some cases cause unintended side effects.

Is it possible to configure this behavior?

Thank you in advance for your guidance.

[stefanprodan]

The Jobs don't run on reconcile if there is no change in the Job YAML, Flux skips applying objects without changes.

[dan0sh]

Thanks for the clarification.

In our use case, we need to set ttlSecondsAfterFinished so the Pod is automatically deleted after the Job completes — we don’t want finished Pods to remain stuck around:

piVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
  name: deploy-db
spec:
  ttlSecondsAfterFinished: 30
  template:
    spec:
      restartPolicy: Never
      containers:
        - name: hello
          image: busybox:1.36
          command: ["sh", "-c", "echo 'hello world'"]

The problem is that with this setup, Job object itself is also deleted when the TTL expires. On the next Flux reconciliation, the Job is seen as missing and is recreated — causing it to run again even if there has been no source change.