4.0 KiB
Manage Helm releases
The helm-controller allows you to
declaratively manage Helm chart releases with Kubernetes manifests.
It makes use of the artifacts produced by the
source-controller from
HelmRepository and HelmChart resources.
The helm-controller is part of the default toolkit installation.
Prerequisites
To follow this guide you'll need a Kubernetes cluster with the GitOps toolkit controllers installed on it. Please see the get started guide or the install command docs.
Define a Helm repository
To be able to deploy a Helm chart, the Helm chart repository has to be
known first to the source-controller, so that the HelmRelease can
reference to it.
A cluster administrator should register trusted sources by creating
HelmRepository resources in the gitops-system namespace.
By default, the source-controller watches for sources only in the
gitops-system namespace, this way cluster admins can prevent
untrusted sources from being registered by users.
apiVersion: source.fluxcd.io/v1alpha1
kind: HelmRepository
metadata:
name: podinfo
namespace: gitops-system
spec:
interval: 1m
url: https://stefanprodan.github.io/podinfo
The interval defines at which interval the Helm repository index
is fetched, and should be at least 1m. Setting this to a higher
value means newer chart versions will be detected at a slower pace,
a push-based fetch can be introduced using webhook receivers
The url can be any HTTP/S Helm repository URL.
!!! hint "Authentication"
HTTP/S basic and TLS authentication can be configured for private
Helm repositories. See the HelmRepository CRD docs
for more details.
Define a Helm release
With the HelmRepository created, define a new HelmRelease to deploy
the Helm chart from the repository:
apiVersion: helm.fluxcd.io/v2alpha1
kind: HelmRelease
metadata:
name: podinfo
namespace: default
spec:
interval: 5m
chart:
name: podinfo
version: '^4.0.0'
sourceRef:
kind: HelmRepository
name: podinfo
namespace: gitops-system
interval: 1m
values:
replicaCount: 2
The chart.name is the name of the chart as made available by the Helm
repository, and may not include any aliases.
The chart.version can be a fixed semver, or any semver range (i.e.
>=4.0.0 <4.0.2).
The chart values are used by the helm-controller as a template to
create a new HelmChart resource in the same namespace as the
sourceRef. The source-controller will then lookup the chart in the
artifact of the referenced HelmRepository, fetch the chart, and make
it available as a HelmChart artifact to be used by the
helm-controller.
!!! Note
The HelmRelease offers an extensive set of configurable flags
for finer grain control over how Helm actions are performed.
See the HelmRelease CRD docs
for more details.
Receive notifications
The default toolkit installation configures the helm-controller to broadcast events to the notification-controller.
To receive the events as notifications, a Provider needs to be setup
first as described in the notifications guide.
Once you have set up the Provider, create a new Alert resource in
the gitops-system to start receiving notifications about the Helm
release:
apiVersion: notification.fluxcd.io/v1alpha1
kind: Alert
metadata:
generation: 2
name: helm-podinfo
namespace: gitops-system
spec:
providerRef:
name: slack
eventSeverity: info
eventSources:
- kind: HelmRepository
name: podinfo
- kind: HelmChart
name: default-podinfo
- kind: HelmRelease
name: podinfo
namespace: default
