Helm is a tool that streamlines installing and managing Kubernetes applications and resources. Think of it like apt/yum/homebrew for Kubernetes. Use of Helm charts is recommended, because they are maintained and typically kept up to date by the Kubernetes community.
In this workshop we are installing Helm 3 instead of Helm 2 for security reasons. Helm 3 doesn’t have the server/client architecture like Helm 2. There is no tiller server component. So the installation is just for the helm command line component which interacts with Kubernetes through your kubectl configuration file and the default Kubernetes RBAC.
Verify that helm is working:
helm versionOutput
version.BuildInfo{Version:"v3.5.4", GitCommit:"1b5edb69df3d3a08df77c9902dc17af864ff05d1", GitTreeState:"clean", GoVersion:"go1.15.11"}Once you have Helm ready, you can add a chart repository. Helm 3 no longer ships with a default chart repository. Therefore, check Artifact Hub for available Helm chart repositories.
The helm repo command group provides commands to add, list, and remove repositories. New repositories can be added with helm repo add:
helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnamiOuput:
"bitnami" has been added to your repositoriesBecause chart repositories change frequently, at any point you can make sure your Helm client is up to date by running helm repo update.
You can see which repositories are configured using helm repo list:
helm repo listRepositories can be removed with helm repo remove.
Helm comes with a powerful search command. It can be used to search two different types of source:
helm search hubsearches the Artifact Hub, which lists helm charts from dozens of different repositories.helm search repo <NAME>searches the repositories that you have added to your local helm client (with helm repo add). This search is done over local data, and no public network connection is needed.