<p>Is there a way to make <code>skaffold dev</code> completely skip image building including the initial one? I have a prebuilt image. All I want skaffold to do is deploy the K8s Deployment YAML file and sync local files to it. I couldn't find a working example of how to do this. Closest was <a href="https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/skaffold/tree/main/examples/hot-reload" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this one</a> but it assumes an initial image build.</p>
<p><code>skaffold dev --auto-build=false</code> stills builds.</p>
<p>my <code>skaffold.yaml</code></p>
<pre class="lang-yaml prettyprint-override"><code>apiVersion: skaffold/v2beta26
kind: Config
build:
  artifacts:
  - image: gcr.io/my-project/my-repo
    context: .
    sync:
      infer: [&quot;**/*&quot;]
deploy:
  kubectl:
    manifests:
    - skaffold/*.yaml
</code></pre>
<pre><code>skaffold dev --auto-build=false --default-repo gcr.io/my-project

Listing files to watch...
 - gcr.io/my-project/my-repo
Generating tags...
 - gcr.io/my-project/my-repo -&gt; gcr.io/my-project/my-repo:v0.7.4-182-gb47cd3b5-dirty
Checking cache...
 - gcr.io/my-project/my-repo: Not found. Building
Starting build...
Building [gcr.io/my-project/my-repo]...
</code></pre>
<p>Update: Using skaffold v1.35.0 on an Ubuntu VM, deploying to remote GKE cluster version 1.20.10-gke.1600 created via Google Cloud Console. Storing images in Google Container Registry (gcr.io).</p>

David Xia
<p>Skaffold's <code>build.local.tryImportMissing: true</code> setting will cause Skaffold to use a tagged image if it already exists.  In your example above, Skaffold would look for <code>gcr.io/my-project/my-repo:v0.7.4-182-gb47cd3b5-dirty</code>.</p>
<p>You could combine <code>tryImportMissing</code> with <code>skaffold dev --tag {fixed-tag}</code> argument to override the tagging policy to specify a fixed tag.</p>
<p>And <code>skaffold dev</code> also supports <code>--auto-build=false --auto-deploy=false</code> to avoid re-building and re-deploying changed images.</p>
