Helm

Helm is a package manager (similar to dnf or brew). The artifact produce by helm is a chart. The chart contains the info needed to create the cluster.

They are stored in a repository. At runtime, it replaces placeholders in yaml templates files with the actual end-user defined values.

Discovering and Installing a Public Helm Chart

You can go to artifacthub.io/packages

Search for a chart:

helm seach hub jenkins

We can add repos for helm to look into them:

helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitname.com/bitnami
helm repo update # this will give us the latest versions of the charts

Once we add the repo we can install the chart with

helm install jenkins bitnami/jenkins

Listing installed charts

helm list

Then we can actually see the k8s objects/resources that were created by it. At any point we can choose to uninstall the charts.

We can uninstall this at any time

helm uninstall jenkins

Building and Installing a Custom Helm Chart

This is not part of the exam, but good to know. We have a Chart.yaml and it has the meta info of the chart. Then we will have the values.yaml were we can define specific values that need to be change at runtime.

We have another dir templates there we have all the manifests for the k8s objects/resources.

You can just render the template helm temlpate /path/to/the/chart/.