Use Github Page to Configure public helm chart repository

Create a new GitHub repository

Clone the repository

git clone git@github.com:ChrisDevOpsOrg/helm-charts.git
cd helm-charts

Create robots.txt

To avoid bot crawling

echo -e "User-Agent: *\nDisallow: /" > robots.txt

Create a helm chart from scratch

mkdir -p chart-sources
cd chart-sources
helm create demo

lint the chart

helm lint chart-sources/*

Create helm chart package

helm package chart-sources/nginx-demo

Configure the “helm-chart” repository as a GitHub pages site

Go to GitHub repository -> settings -> GitHub Pages

Create the helm chart repository index

A repository is characterized primarily by the presence of a special file called index.yaml that has a list of all of the packages supplied by the repository, together with metadata that allows retrieving and verifying those packages.

# The URL is your github page URL, is not github repo URL
helm repo index --url https://ChrisDevOpsOrg.github.io/helm-charts/ .

Push your charts to Github

git add . && git commit -m "Initial commit" && git push origin master

Add new charts to an existing repository

Whenever you need to add a new chart to the Helm chart repository, it’s mandatory for you to regenerate the index.yaml file. The $ helm repo index command will completely rebuild the index.yaml file from scratch, including only the charts that it finds locally, which very likely is our case. However, it worth notice that you can use the --merge flag to incrementally add new charts to an existing index.yaml

helm repo index --url https://ChrisDevOpsOrg.github.io/helm-charts/ --merge index.yaml .

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Configure Github private Repo as helm chart repository

Create helm chart repository index

For the private helm chart repo, you dont need to specify URL.

helm repo index .

Your index.yaml will looks like:

apiVersion: v1
entries:
  demo:
  - apiVersion: v2
    appVersion: 1.0.0
    created: "2023-11-25T08:21:50.859702701+08:00"
    description: A Helm chart for Kubernetes
    digest: 0acf4ab914823060cbd07e104105e733a5fc56fbfc15ecd86aece6b9e831c05e
    name: demo
    type: application
    urls:
    - demo-0.1.1.tgz
    version: 0.1.1
  - apiVersion: v2
    appVersion: 1.0.0
    created: "2023-11-25T08:21:50.85941036+08:00"
    description: A Helm chart for Kubernetes
    digest: f88a2a39923ae48e42c314c521254b4288a51f807c6b90e4041d81cc1ed02e25
    name: demo
    type: application
    urls:
    - demo-0.1.0.tgz
    version: 0.1.0
generated: "2023-11-25T08:21:50.8590034+08:00"

Installing from the Private Repository

export GITHUB_TOKEN="YOUR_GITHUB_TOKEN"
helm repo add demo-charts "https://${GITHUB_TOKEN}@raw.githubusercontent.com/ChrisDevOpsOrg/helm-charts/main/"

• Enclose the url with double quote " "
• The trailing / is mandatory
• If you want to use different branch, change the main to your branch name.

Onec the repos is added, you can search it or install charts from it. Note that you will have to update the local repository index when looking for new versions.

helm repo update
helm search repo demo-charts --devel