Deployment configuration mismatch

April 30, 2026 · View on GitHub

Playbook ID: config-mismatch Category: deploy Severity: medium Tags: config, env, secret, missing-variable, deployment

What this failure means

The deployment failed because a required configuration value, environment variable, or secret was absent or had an unexpected value for the target environment.

Common log signals

missing configuration
config not found
no such secret
secret not found
configmap not found
invalid configuration
cannot find key

Diagnosis

The deployment failed because a required configuration value, environment variable, or secret was absent or had an unexpected value for the target environment.

This usually happens when a deployment references a secret or ConfigMap that was never provisioned, or when a key name changed in code without a matching change to the environment definition.

Fix steps

  1. Compare expected configuration keys against what is present in the target environment. For Kubernetes:

    kubectl get secret <name> -n <namespace> -o jsonpath="{.data}" | jq "keys"
kubectl get configmap <name> -n <namespace> -o yaml

  2. List all environment variables the pod sees to confirm keys are mounted:

    kubectl exec <pod> -- env | sort

  3. Add or update the missing keys in the secret or ConfigMap, then re-trigger the deployment.

  4. If a key was renamed, update both the secret store and the deployment spec in the same commit to avoid drift.

  5. Add a start-of-process config validation step in the application that lists every missing required key at boot time rather than failing later with a cryptic error.

Validation

  • kubectl exec <pod> -- env | grep KEY_NAME shows the expected value.
  • Re-run the deployment and confirm it reaches the Running / Ready state.

Likely files to inspect

  • k8s/**/*.yaml
  • deploy/**/*.yaml
  • helm/**/*.yaml
  • .env.example

Run Faultline

faultline analyze build.log
faultline explain config-mismatch
faultline workflow build.log --json --mode agent

Search phrases this page answers

  • Deployment configuration mismatch
  • Deploy: deployment configuration mismatch
  • missing configuration
  • faultline explain config-mismatch

Generated from playbooks/bundled/log/deploy/config-mismatch.yaml. Do not edit directly — run make docs-generate.