This is unreleased documentation for Policy Manager 1.29-next.

Configuring policies

Skipping namespaces for a specific policy

By default, policies apply to all Namespaces that the PolicyServer is configured for. If you want a policy to target only specific namespaces, you can deploy several AdmissionPolicies in each Namespace.

Another option is to configure ClusterAdmissionPolicies by setting their spec.namespaceSelector (see CRD docs). The spec.namespaceSelector decides whether to run the policy on an object, based on whether the namespace for that object matches the selector.

For example, here is a policy that only targets the kube-system and my-namespace Namespaces:

---
apiVersion: policies.kubewarden.io/v1
kind: ClusterAdmissionPolicy
metadata:
  name: psa-enforcer-privileged-namespaces
spec:
  module: registry://ghcr.io/kubewarden/policies/psa-label-enforcer:v1.0.3
  rules:
    - apiGroups: [""]
      apiVersions: ["v1"]
      resources: ["namespaces"]
      operations:
        - CREATE
        - UPDATE
  mutating: true
  namespaceSelector:
    matchExpressions:
      - key: "kubernetes.io/metadata.name"
        operator: In
        values: [kube-system, my-namespace]
  settings:
    modes:
      enforce: "privileged"

Here is a policy that targets all the Namespaces besides the kube-system and my-namespace:

---
apiVersion: policies.kubewarden.io/v1
kind: ClusterAdmissionPolicy
metadata:
  name: psa-enforcer-default-mode
spec:
  module: registry://ghcr.io/kubewarden/policies/psa-label-enforcer:v1.0.3
  rules:
    - apiGroups: [""]
      apiVersions: ["v1"]
      resources: ["namespaces"]
      operations:
        - CREATE
        - UPDATE
  mutating: true
  namespaceSelector:
    matchExpressions:
      - key: "kubernetes.io/metadata.name"
        operator: NotIn
        values: [kube-system, my-namespace]
  settings:
    modes:
      enforce: "restricted"

Custom rejection message

When a policy rejects a resource, the message shown to the user is the one written by the policy author. Sometimes cluster operators may want to set a custom reject message. For example, this can be used to point to an internal wiki or to provide a more specific error code.

The message field in the ClusterAdmissionPolicy and AdmissionPolicy types can be used to achieve this.

ClusterAdmissionPolicyGroup and AdmissionPolicyGroup already have a message field that behaves in the same way.

The message field allows cluster operators to define a custom reject message that overrides the one returned by the policy. When using this configuration, the original rejection message can be found in the causes field of the response.

apiVersion: policies.kubewarden.io/v1
kind: ClusterAdmissionPolicy
metadata:
  name: pod-privileged-with-message
spec:
  module: registry://ghcr.io/kubewarden/policies/pod-privileged:1.0.2
  policyServer: default
  mode: protect
  message: "Nops! You cannot do that"
  settings: {}
  rules:
    - apiGroups:
        - ""
      apiVersions:
        - v1
      resources:
        - "*"
      operations:
        - CREATE
  mutating: false

You can obtain the full details of a rejected admission request by increasing the verbosity level of kubectl:

$ kubectl -v4 run pod-privileged2 --image=registry.k8s.io/pause --privileged
I0612 16:32:43.647601   48424 cert_rotation.go:137] Starting client certificate rotation controller
I0612 16:32:43.662550   48424 helpers.go:246] server response object: [{
  "metadata": {},
  "status": "Failure",
  "message": "admission webhook \"clusterwide-pod-privileged-with-message.kubewarden.admission\" denied the request: Nops! You cannot do that",
  "details": {
    "causes": [
      {
        "message": "Privileged container is not allowed"
      }
    ]
  },
  "code": 400
}]