helm/docs/faq.md

Frequently Asked Questions

This page provides help with the most common questions about Helm.

We'd love your help making this document better. To add, correct, or remove information, file an issue or send us a pull request.

Changes since Helm 2

Here's an exhaustive list of all the major changes introduced in Helm 3.

Go import path changes

In Helm 3, Helm switched the Go import path over from k8s.io/helm to helm.sh/helm. If you intend to upgrade to the Helm 3 Go client libraries, make sure to change your import paths.

Helm delete

In order to better align the verbiage from other package managers, helm delete was re-named to helm uninstall. helm delete is still retained as an alias to helm uninstall, so either form can be used.

In Helm 2, in order to purge the release ledger, the --purge flag had to be provided. This functionality is now enabled by default. To retain the previous behaviour, use helm uninstall --keep-history.

Installing

Why aren't there Debian/Fedora/... native packages of Helm?

We'd love to provide these or point you toward a trusted provider. If you're interested in helping, we'd love it. This is how the Homebrew formula was started.

Why do you provide a curl ...|bash script?

There is a script in our repository (scripts/get) that can be executed as a curl ..|bash script. The transfers are all protected by HTTPS, and the script does some auditing of the packages it fetches. However, the script has all the usual dangers of any shell script.

We provide it because it is useful, but we suggest that users carefully read the script first. What we'd really like, though, are better packaged releases of Helm.

How do I put the Helm client files somewhere other than ~/.helm?

Set the $HELM_HOME environment variable, and then run helm init:

export HELM_HOME=/some/path
helm init --client-only

Note that if you have existing repositories, you will need to re-add them with helm repo add....

Uninstalling

I want to delete my local Helm. Where are all its files?

Along with the helm binary, Helm stores some files in $HELM_HOME, which is located by default in ~/.helm.

Troubleshooting

On GKE (Google Container Engine) I get "No SSH tunnels currently open"

Error: Error forwarding ports: error upgrading connection: No SSH tunnels currently open. Were the targets able to accept an ssh-key for user "gke-[redacted]"?

Another variation of the error message is:

Unable to connect to the server: x509: certificate signed by unknown authority

The issue is that your local Kubernetes config file must have the correct credentials.

When you create a cluster on GKE, it will give you credentials, including SSL certificates and certificate authorities. These need to be stored in a Kubernetes config file (Default: ~/.kube/config so that kubectl and helm can access them.

Why do I get a unsupported protocol scheme "" error when trying to pull a chart from my custom repo?**

(Helm < 2.5.0) This is likely caused by you creating your chart repo index without specifying the --url flag. Try recreating your index.yaml file with a command like helm repo index --url http://my-repo/charts ., and then re-uploading it to your custom charts repo.

This behavior was changed in Helm 2.5.0.