Automate Helm Release Process

[realshuting]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The Helm chart is published manually by uploading assets to gh-pages branch. It would good to automate this process in the CI workflow, any changes in the chart can then be picked up and published accordingly, see #2052 (comment).

[DarthBenro008]

Hi @realshuting , I came across this GitHub action @helm/chart-releaser-action and thought would be useful for this scenario, but I noticed Kyverno's GitHub CI already makes use of this in the release.yaml

kyverno/.github/workflows/release.yaml

Lines 179 to 182 in 3b06378

	- name: Run chart-releaser
	uses: helm/chart-releaser-action@v1.1.0
	env:
	CR_TOKEN: "${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}"

Ideally, shouldn't this action take care of automating the helm release?

[realshuting]

Yes @DarthBenro008 , we had this working before and it was broken at some point. Last time I tried investigating the issue but with no luck, so we switched to the manual release process. The difficult thing is how to test this action, we cannot really push a new Helm release to test that, it's better to test it locally or in some other private repo.

[DarthBenro008]

@realshuting i think temporary testing in a new branch of a forked repo would workout, if not we could write a small bash script automation that can be called by the CI to release helm charts.

I'd like to help in this investigation and see if we can use the chart-releaser-action to work 😃

[realshuting]

Thanks @DarthBenro008, assigned!

[treydock]

@DarthBenro008 @realshuting That chart releaser doesn't work with tags. This is what happens in Github Action:

Nothing to do. No chart changes detected.

This is a well known and frustrating "feature" of the official Helm releaser action. I ran into this on some of my projects and also had MetalLB developers run into it too. The solution is a different chart releaser, like this one: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/helm-publisher

I use that on several of my projects where I release Helm charts to match the tag they are released against. Like here: https://github.com/OSC/k8-ldap-configmap/blob/main/.github/workflows/release.yaml#L48-L51. This one has served me well as I use the same chart version and release scheme as Kyverno.

[realshuting]

This is great @treydock, good to know!