Kubernetes & Helm Cursor Rules (.mdc) | Cloud-Native Manifest Validator

Production-grade architectural rulebook for Kubernetes & Helm Charts. Engineered to eliminate LLM hallucinations, enforce strict deterministic conventions, and prevent architectural drift across Cursor IDE, Claude Code CLI, and autonomous multi-agent pipelines.

Target Path

.cursor/rules/kubernetes.mdc

Execution Scope

Glob Pattern Auto-Match

Specification Format

Frontmatter MDC (.mdc)

AI Tool Support

Cursor IDE & Composer

02 / DRIFT ANALYSIS & VALUE PROPOSITION

Failure Patterns Prevented for Kubernetes & Helm Charts

Without This Rule (Default LLM Behavior)Vulnerable

AI models frequently write dangerous Kubernetes manifests with missing CPU/memory limits, root privilege escalation, missing health probes, and invalid Helm template whitespace indentation, causing cluster outages or CVE vulnerabilities.

Hallucination Symptoms

Invokes deprecated or removed APIs from older model training weights
Generates conflicting configuration files and invalid imports
Silently drops type-safety, boundaries, or transaction isolation

With This Rule (Guaranteed Invariants)Deterministic

Always specify explicit resources.requests and resources.limits (both CPU and memory) on every container.

Enforce strict security contexts: readOnlyRootFilesystem: true, runAsNonRoot: true, and allowPrivilegeEscalation: false.

Mandate both livenessProbe and readinessProbe with appropriate initialDelaySeconds on deployment workloads.

Validate Helm template indentation using nindent filters (e.g. toYaml . | nindent 8) to eliminate YAML formatting corruption.

Configure PodDisruptionBudgets (PDB) and topology spread constraints for multi-node high availability.

03 / VERIFIED CODE PATTERNS

Code Standards: Anti-Pattern vs Verified Implementation

Discouraged Anti-Pattern

# Dangerous: No resource constraints, root container, missing probes
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: bad-service
spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: app
          image: myapp:latest # Mutable tag and unconstrained limits!

Verified Production Standard

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: api-service
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: api-service
spec:
  replicas: 3
  template:
    spec:
      securityContext:
        runAsNonRoot: true
        runAsUser: 10001
      containers:
        - name: api
          image: registry.example.com/api:v1.4.0
          securityContext:
            allowPrivilegeEscalation: false
            readOnlyRootFilesystem: true
          resources:
            requests:
              cpu: 100m
              memory: 128Mi
            limits:
              cpu: 500m
              memory: 512Mi
          readinessProbe:
            httpGet:
              path: /healthz
              port: 8080
            initialDelaySeconds: 5

04 / REPOSITORY PLACEMENT & 3-STEP TERMINAL INSTALLATION

How to Install Kubernetes & Helm Charts Cursor Rules (.mdc) via Terminal

Step 1: Open Project Directory & Verify Target Placement

Open your terminal and navigate to your project root folder where the .cursor/rules/kubernetes.mdc file will reside. Ensure the file is placed at the exact path below relative to your project root so the AI engine automatically loads it:

.cursor/rules/kubernetes.mdc

Step 2: Fetch Rule File via Terminal Command

Run curl, PowerShell, or wget to stream the rule directly from the DevScratchpad raw API endpoint and write it to .cursor/rules/kubernetes.mdc:

Terminal One-Liner Install

Run directly in your project root to stream and write this rule file with one command.

Raw API Stream

mkdir -p ".cursor/rules" && curl -fsSL "https://www.devscratchpad.tech/api/raw/cursor-rules/kubernetes-helm" -o ".cursor/rules/kubernetes.mdc"

Step 3: Verify and Activate with AI Agent

Launch your AI coding assistant (Cursor IDE & Composer). The assistant will automatically discover .cursor/rules/kubernetes.mdc in your repository and apply the architectural guardrails, type constraints, and verification protocols during code generation.

05 / ROUTE DIRECTORY & CROSS-TOOLING

Alternative AI Formats for Kubernetes & Helm ChartsCross-Tooling

/ai-skill-studio/claude-skills/kubernetes-helmKubernetes & Helm Charts Claude Skill (SKILL.md)

→

/ai-skill-studio/claude-md/kubernetes-helmKubernetes & Helm Charts CLAUDE.md Memory

→

/ai-skill-studio/agents-md/kubernetes-helmKubernetes & Helm Charts AGENTS.md Spec

→

Related Cursor Rules (.mdc) PresetsSame Directory

Frontend

Next.js 15 App Router

→