Helm Charts Manager (Deprecated please use ArgoCD/Flux instead)

A command line tool to easily lint, plan and deploy multiple helm charts.

Prerequisites

• A Kubernetes cluster
• Helm3 (>=V3.2.4)
• Helm Diff Plugin

Features

• Helm chart linting.
• Helm chart planning and comparison with existing deployment.
• Helm chart deployment.
• YAML based configuration and environment definition.
• Automated updating and re-packaging existing charts
• Parallelized structure for optimized performance.

Usage

• helm-charts-manager plan [options] : Run helm charts manager in planning mode to see the difference between existing deployment and current charts.
• helm-charts-manager apply [options] : Run helm charts manager in deployment mode to deploy the charts. Apply always plans first and has to be approved before deploying. This behaviour can be overriden with --auto-approve option.
• helm-charts-manager lint [options] : Run helm charts manager in linting mode to check charts for errors and bad practices.
• helm-charts-manager list-unmanaged [--skip-namespaces=namespace1,namespace2] [options] : Print out helm charts which are not managed by helm charts manager

Command line options

• -h | --help : Shows the help screen.
• -v | --version : Shows version string.
• --config-file <configFile> : Path to the configuration YAML file for helm-charts-manager. Defaults to ./helm-charts-manager-config.yaml
• --charts-path <chartsPath> : Path to the base directory where helm charts are stored. Defaults to ./
• --charts <charts> : List of chart names separated with a comma to select the charts to be lined/planned/deployed. Defaults to the list of chart names in the configuration YAML.
• --auto-approve : Overrides the deployment y/n query. Useful for automated deployment via CI/CD pipelies.
• --update : Update and repackage the charts before linting/planning/deploying.
• --debug : Enable debug printouts for every command executed.

Configuration via YAML

Please see /example/helm-charts-manager-config.yaml

Important: STAGE and RELEASE_VERSION environment variables are mandatory.

It is possible to specify multiple stages in the same configuration file. STAGE environment variable serves as a selector between different stages.

Example:

First download and install minikube and helm. Start a local kubernetes cluster with:

minikube start

Then download all files from the example directory in repository and execute the following commands:

cd example
helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
helm-charts-manager apply --update

You should see the following output:

The charts for nginx and kubernetes-dashboard are installed on our minikube cluster.

If we want to override some values we need to configure the helm-charts-manager-config.yaml file.

Open helm-charts-manager-config.yaml and add in line 22 at the end "--set kubernetes-dashboard.service.type=NodePort".

Now apply the changes with this command:

helm-charts-manager apply --charts kubernetes-dashboard

You should see this output

As you can see helm-charts manager just updated our kubernetes-dashboard chart.

Related projects

• helmfile helm-charts-manager is the KISS version of helmfile.