Helm tutorial

Overview

In tutorial I will give you brief introduction to Helm. You might ask, what is Helm? Simply put helm is a Kubernetes package manager. Sort of like apt-get or yum but for Kubernetes.

This project is similar to hello-docker-deployment. I highly recommend that you go read that first to understand what we will be creating in this project. Just like in the project mentioned above you will be creating a single service and a simple pod which has a spring boot application running inside of it.

My setup

• Host OS: Ubuntu 18.04
• Docker: 18.06.0-ce
• Minikube: 0.28.2
• Kubectl:
  • Client version: 1.11.2
  • Server version: 1.10.0
• Helm:
  • Client version: 2.9.1
  • Server version: 2.9.1

If you are running linux do not use snap to install helm. Snap install is having issues when installing helm. Instead of using snap install helm manually. Instructions to install helm manually.

How to run

• Once helm is installed go ahead and run helm init which will install tiller on the minikube.

• After tiller is up and running in the minikube execute helm install ./hello-docker-chart this will install the chart with in the minikube.

• To test to see if the chart is properly installed and the application is up find the IP for minikube by typing minikube ip.

• execute <minikubeip>:30001/hello inside of a browser to see the results.

• To delete the deployment helm delete --purge <Release Name>

About Helm

• Helm uses templating engine from GO with it's own flare. Inside of the templates directory you will find yaml files that hold configurations for various types of Kubernetes objects. You can also do interpolation and fetch values from the values.yaml file as well. Compare the deployment.yaml and service.yaml file in this project with the hello-docker-deployment.yml and hello-docker-svc.yml in the hello-docker-deployment project to see the differences and similarities. Visit Helm Docs to learn how to create your own templates.

Commands used to create this tutorial

• To create chart using helm CLI

  • helm create <hello-docker-chart>

• To initalize Helm

  • helm init

• To render chart by using tiller

  • helm install --debug --dry-run ./<hello-docker-chart>

• To install chart

  • helm install <./hello-docker-chart>

• To delete chart

  • helm delete --purge <Release Name>