Helm Archetype Plugin

This plugin extends Helm's built-in create from capabilities by allowing templated starters. Such templated starters get rendered at creation time as if their helm template output got dumped into a brand new chart.

Such an approach aims at reducing the overall complexity of helm charts by shifting left part of the rendering logic and narrowing down their scope, yet preserving the flexibility to later re-assess such a scope throughout repeated creation.

To distinguish between creation time templates and install time templates, creation time templates are to be delimited by double round brackets as opposed to double curly brackets

# Somewhere within the starter templates
((- if .Values.to.be.rendered.at.creation.time ))
version: {{ .Values.to.be.rendered.at.install.time }}
((- end ))

Starter's values.yaml can also contain templates.

The values to be provided at helm archetype time are structured with two root nodes :

• Chart node will provide Chart.yaml metadata (apart from the chart name which is provided as a positional argument to the plug-in)
• Values node will provide the necessary values for the rendering exercise

For example :

Chart:
  description: "Helm archetype chart"
  version: "0.2.1"
  appVersion: "0.3.0"

Values:
  version: "0.1.0"

Additionally, as this plugin extends Helm's built-in create from capabilities, the <CHARTNAME> value can also be used within the starter, and, quoting Helm documentation "All occurrences of <CHARTNAME> will be replaced with the specified chart name so that starter charts can be used as templates."

Template files which would result as empty (or blank) past the rendering exercise will be deleted in order to guarantee the thinner possible chart structure.

Usage

Create a new chart from a templated starter scaffold.

$ helm archetype [NAME] [STARTER] [flags]

Flags:

     --set stringArray          set values on the command line (can specify multiple or separate values with commas: key1=val1,key2=val2)
     --set-file stringArray     set values from respective files specified via the command line (can specify multiple or separate values with commas: key1=path1,key2=path2)
     --set-string stringArray   set STRING values on the command line (can specify multiple or separate values with commas: key1=val1,key2=val2)
 -f, --values strings           specify values in a YAML file or a URL (can specify multiple)

Install

$ helm plugin install https://github.com/codeJack/helm-archetype

The above will fetch the latest binary release of helm archetype and install it.

In case the remote helm plugin install fails you can clone this repository and rely on make install.