Kubernetes Helm Tutorial

In this guide I will walk you through the basics of Kubernetes Helm. This includes different kinds of installations, the use of public charts and of course, creating and managing your own charts.

Table of contents:

• Introduction
• Part I: Setting up a local dev environment
• Part II: Installing helm
• Part III: Deploy your first chart
• Part IV: Creating your own chart
• Part V: Update, Rollback and what's under the hood
• Part VI: Setup our own chart repo
• Part VII: Dependency management
• References

Introduction

Let's start off by shortly summing up what Helm is good for and why you should use it. Helm makes your life easier when it comes to managing Kubernetes resources. It helps you by grouping your resources in so called Charts and assigning them semantic versions. In that way, you can package and release you resources along with your application. To make this more flexible, Helm uses a very strong templating framework which is based on Go-Template.

Enough talking. Let's make our hands dirty and start with setting up a local dev environment.

References

• Helm on Github
• Official Helm Site
• Chart best practices