flux2/docs/guides/helmreleases.md

Managing 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.