Unknown flag --metrics-require-rbac in ansible-operator command

Bug Report

What did you do?

reated a new Ansible-based operator using Operator SDK:

$ operator-sdk init --domain myorg.io --plugins ansible

Created a new API for kind "MyKind":

$ operator-sdk create api --version v1alpha1 --kind MyKind --generate-role

And then manually fixed the issue reported here.

Built and pushed the image on Quay:

IMG=quay.io/myorg/myoperator:v0.0.1 make docker-build docker-push
...

And finally deployed everything on my Kubernetes:

IMG=quay.io/myorg/myoperator:v0.0.1 make deploy
...

What did you expect to see?

The Controller manager Pod of my operator coming up correctly.

What did you see instead? Under which circumstances?

I get this error:

$ kubectl --namespace myoperator-system get all
NAME                                             READY   STATUS             RESTARTS      AGE
pod/myoperator-controller-manager-78948b9df7-lg9vf   0/1     CrashLoopBackOff   6 (88s ago)   7m18s

And the reason is:

$ kubectl --namespace kiraop-system logs pod/kiraop-controller-manager-78948b9df7-lg9vf
Error: unknown flag: --metrics-require-rbac
Usage:
  ansible-operator run [flags]

Flags:
 ...
 ...

2026/03/24 10:50:12 unknown flag: --metrics-require-rbac

Environment

Operator type:

/language ansible

Kubernetes cluster type:

Vanilla.

$ operator-sdk version

operator-sdk version: "v1.42.0", commit: "ab5563df5499cafa4ea9d40d4b36b51899a4718e", kubernetes version: "1.33.1", go version: "go1.24.6", GOOS: "linux", GOARCH: "amd64"

$ kubectl version

Client Version: v1.30.4
Kustomize Version: v5.0.4-0.20230601165947-6ce0bf390ce3
Server Version: v1.30.14

Possible Solution

The solution should be to remove that patch from the config/default/manager_metrics_patch.yaml file:

$ sed -i '/# This patch adds the args to allow RBAC-based authn\/authz the metrics endpoint/,/^$/d' config/default/manager_metrics_patch.yaml

Start with config/default/manager_metrics_patch.yaml and inspect the generated manager deployment arguments. Reproduce the ansible-operator startup with the current generated manifests, then verify that the unsupported --metrics-require-rbac flag is no longer passed and the controller manager Pod starts successfully.