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Helm Charts: Packaging

Saurabh Sharma 4 years ago

Every software cycle includes packaging; which essentially describes how the software written is packaged and shared.

For the software built for Containers Helm is a popular choice of packaging the scripts.

root@master> helm version
version.BuildInfo{Version:"v3.2.4", GitCommit:"0ad800ef43d3b826f31a5ad8dfbb4fe05d143688", GitTreeState:"clean", GoVersion:"go1.13.12"}

Helm is a tool for managing Kubernetes packages called charts.

Helm enables management of applications built for Kubernetes. It helps you define, install, and upgrade even the most complex Kubernetes application.

Helm

It allows you to

  • Create new charts from scratch
  • Package charts into chart archive (tgz) files
  • Interact with chart repositories where charts are stored
  • Install and uninstall charts into an existing Kubernetes cluster
  • Manage the release cycle of charts that have been installed with Helm

It has two components

  1. Client executable
    • Command line client for end users.
  2. Helm Library
    • It provides the logic for executing all Helm operations and interfaces with the Kubernetes API server.
    • The library uses the Kubernetes client library to communicate with Kubernetes.

The Helm client and library is written in the Go programming language.

Three basic concepts for, Helm (from helm.sh)

  1. The chart is a bundle of information necessary to create an instance of a Kubernetes application.
  2. The config contains configuration information that can be merged into a packaged chart to create a releasable object.
  3. A release is a running instance of a chart, combined with a specific config.

Charts

A chart is a collection of files that describe a related set of Kubernetes resources.

The chart name is derived from the directory name. E.g. A chart describing WordPress would be stored in a wordpress/ directory.

Chart.yml

apiVersion: v1
name: opendistro-es
# Chart version
version: 1.9.0
description: 'Open Distro for Elasticsearch'
engine: gotpl
kubeVersion: ^1.10.0-0
maintainers:
- email: derek.heldt-werle@viasat.com
  name: Derek Heldt-Werle
- email: kalvin.chau@viasat.com
  name: Kalvin Chau
sources:
- https://pages.git.viasat.com/ATG/charts
# Open Distro for Elasticsearch version
appVersion: 1.9.0

When the chart above is used the package opendistro-es-1.9.0.tgz will be generated.

References

  • https://helm.sh/docs/topics/charts/#the-chart-file-structure
  • https://helm.sh/docs/topics/charts/#the-chartyaml-file