How to deserialize Kubernetes YAML file

You need to import _ "k8s.io/client-go/pkg/apis/extensions/install" otherwise the schema is empty, see also docs.

The complete working example is:

$ go get -u github.com/golang/dep/cmd/dep
$ dep init
$ go run main.go

With the following main.go:

package main

import (
    "fmt"

    "k8s.io/client-go/pkg/api"
    _ "k8s.io/client-go/pkg/api/install"
    _ "k8s.io/client-go/pkg/apis/extensions/install"
)

var deployment = `
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: my-nginx
spec:
replicas: 2
template:
  metadata:
    labels:
      run: my-nginx
  spec:
    containers:
    - name: my-nginx
      image: nginx
      ports:
      - containerPort: 80
`

func main() {
    // decode := api.Codecs.UniversalDecoder().Decode
    decode := api.Codecs.UniversalDeserializer().Decode

    obj, _, err := decode([]byte(deployment), nil, nil)
    if err != nil {
        fmt.Printf("%#v", err)
    }

    fmt.Printf("%#v\n", obj)
}

Note that I also imported _ "k8s.io/client-go/pkg/api/install" for you so that you can use objects in v1 such as pods or services.

EDIT: Kudos to my colleague Stefan Schimanski who proposed the initial solution.