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helm

"The Kubernetes Package Manager" - https://github.com/kubernetes/helm

These notes are all about helm version 3. Charts that require helm 3 should use apiVersion: v2, though helm 3 does support v1.

Tips

List all versions of a chart in a given repo

helm search repo -l repo_name/chart_name --devel

Get values of a deployed chart

This only shows values that were passed in, not default values.

$release_name is the NAME column in helm list

helm get values -o yaml "$release_name" > values.yaml

To get a list of all values, use

helm get values --all -o yaml "$release_name" > values.yaml`

Show notes for a deployed service

Notes are printed when you install a service, but they can be viewed again by running helm status <release_name> where <release_name> is one of the releases from helm list.

Install the stable repo

helm repo add stable https://charts.helm.sh/stable

Install the incubator repo

https://github.com/helm/charts#how-do-i-enable-the-incubator-repository

helm repo add incubator https://charts.helm.sh/incubator

Show metadata about a specific release in json

You can find the revision in a few places, like helm list -A. Default is to store data about the last 10 releases per release_name.

helm history -n "$NS" "$RELEASE_NAME" -o json | jq '.[] | select(.revision == 157)'

Show raw data about what helm sent to the k8s server for a recent release

First, find the secret that you will want to search. You can get the release number from helm history -n "$NS" foo or dig in kubectl -n $NS get secret

$ k -n "$NS" get secret | grep sh.helm.release | tail -n 3 | column -t
sh.helm.release.v1.foo.v338  helm.sh/release.v1  1  14d
sh.helm.release.v1.foo.v339  helm.sh/release.v1  1  13d
sh.helm.release.v1.foo.v340  helm.sh/release.v1  1  4d23h

Then send that secret into the following command to get the full manifest that was sent to the k8s api:

k -n "$NS" get secret "$SECRET" -o go-template='{{ .data.release | base64decode | base64decode }}' |
  gzip -d

The result is a json blob with all the details of how the helm chart was applied, including hook manifests, app manifests, and other metadata.