I'm experiencing the same error that was answered here Istio manual sidecar injection gives an error

I can't manually inject istio sidecar into an existing deployment. The solution of making sure the versions match doesn't help me.

# kubectl apply -f <(istioctl kube-inject -f apps_deployment.yml --log_output_level debug) --v=4
I0827 11:17:38.661208   98950 decoder.go:224] decoding stream as YAML
Error: missing configuration map key "values" in "istio-sidecar-injector"
F0827 11:17:38.728899   98950 helpers.go:119] error: error parsing /dev/fd/63: error converting YAML to JSON: yaml: line 4: mapping values are not allowed in this context

# kubectl version
Client Version: version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"11", GitVersion:"v1.11.10", GitCommit:"7a578febe155a7366767abce40d8a16795a96371", GitTreeState:"clean", BuildDate:"2019-05-01T04:14:38Z", GoVersion:"go1.10.8", Compiler:"gc", Platform:"linux/amd64"}
Server Version: version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"11+", GitVersion:"v1.11.10-docker-1", GitCommit:"3ffbabe840b101d7c84263431c8a18b27785929a", GitTreeState:"clean", BuildDate:"2019-05-10T17:53:06Z", GoVersion:"go1.10.8", Compiler:"gc", Platform:"linux/amd64"}

# istioctl version
client version: 1.2.4
ingressgateway version: 94746ccd404a8e056483dd02e4e478097b950da6-dirty
ingressgateway version: 94746ccd404a8e056483dd02e4e478097b950da6-dirty
pilot version: 1.2.4
pilot version: 1.2.4

Expected Results: I expect it to inject the istio sidecar into my deployment.yml configuration.