imagePullPolicy: Never in manager deployment prevents remote cluster deployments

[dcmcand]

Summary

The controller-manager deployment manifest sets imagePullPolicy: Never, which prevents the operator from being deployed on remote clusters (e.g., EKS, GKE) where the image needs to be pulled from quay.io.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Deploy the operator to a remote cluster using kustomize with config/default as the base
2. The pod enters ErrImageNeverPull status because the image quay.io/nebari/nebari-operator is not available locally on the node

Expected Behavior

imagePullPolicy should default to something appropriate for production use (e.g., IfNotPresent or Always for mutable tags).

Current Workaround

Downstream consumers must add a strategic merge patch to override imagePullPolicy:

# deployment-patch.yaml
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: nebari-operator-controller-manager
spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: manager
          imagePullPolicy: Always

Suggestion

Update the manager deployment in config/manager/ to use IfNotPresent (or remove imagePullPolicy entirely and let Kubernetes default it based on the tag). Never should only be used in local development overlays, not in the base manifests.

[viniciusdc]

that was because I was testing with kind load, thanks for flagging that out