helm/docs/install.md

Installing Helm

There are two parts to Helm: The Helm client (helm) and the Helm server (Tiller). This guide shows how to install the client, and then proceeds to show two ways to install the server.

Installing the Helm Client

The Helm client can be installed either from source, or from pre-built binary releases.

From the GitHub Releases

Every release of Helm provides binary releases for a variety of OSes. These binary versions can be manually downloaded and installed.

1. Download your desired version
2. Unpack it (tar -zxvf helm-v2.0.0-linux-amd64.tgz)
3. Find the helm binary in the unpacked directory, and move it to its desired destination (mv linux-amd64/helm /usr/local/bin/helm)

From there, you should be able to run the client: helm help.

From Homebrew (Mac OSX)

Members of the Kubernetes community have contributed a Helm cask built to Homebrew. This formula is generally up to date.

brew cask install helm

(Note: There is also a formula for emacs-helm, which is a different project.)

From Source (Linux, Mac OSX)

Building Helm from source is slightly more work, but is the best way to go if you want to test the latest (pre-release) Helm version.

You must have a working Go environment.

$ cd $GOPATH
$ mkdir -p src/k8s.io
$ cd src/k8s.io
$ git clone https://github.com/kubernetes/helm.git
$ cd helm
$ make bootstrap build

The bootstrap target will attempt to install dependencies, rebuild the vendor/ tree, and validate configuration.

The build target will compile helm and place it in bin/helm. Tiller is also compiled, and is placed in bin/tiller.

Installing Tiller

Tiller, the server portion of Helm, typically runs inside of your Kubernetes cluster. But for development, it can also be run locally, and configured to talk to a remote Kubernetes cluster.

Easy In-Cluster Installation

The easiest way to install tiller into the cluster is simply to run helm init. This will validate that helm's local environment is set up correctly (and set it up if necessary). Then it will connect to whatever cluster kubectl connects to by default (kubectl config view). Once it connects, it will install tiller into the kube-system namespace.

After helm init, you should be able to run kubectl get po --namespace kube-system and see Tiller running.

Once Tiller is installed, running helm version should show you both the client and server version. (If it shows only the client version, helm cannot yet connect to the server. Use kubectl to see if any tiller pods are running.)

Running Tiller Locally

For development, it is sometimes easier to work on Tiller locally, and configure it to connect to a remote Kubernetes cluster.

The process of building Tiller is explained above.

Once tiller has been built, simply start it:

$ bin/tiller
Tiller running on :44134

When Tiller is running locally, it will attempt to connect to the Kubernetes cluster that is configured by kubectl. (Run kubectl config view to see which cluster that is.)

You must tell helm to connect to this new local Tiller host instead of connecting to the one in-cluster. There are two ways to do this. The first is to specify the --host option on the command line. The second is to set the $HELM_HOST environment variable.

$ export HELM_HOST=localhost:44134
$ helm version # Should connect to localhost.
Client: &version.Version{SemVer:"v2.0.0-alpha.4", GitCommit:"db...", GitTreeState:"dirty"}
Server: &version.Version{SemVer:"v2.0.0-alpha.4", GitCommit:"a5...", GitTreeState:"dirty"}

Importantly, even when running locally, Tiller will store release configuration in ConfigMaps inside of Kubernetes.

Conclusion

In most cases, installation is as simple as getting a pre-built helm binary and running helm init. This document covers additional cases for those who want to do more sophisticated things with Helm.

Once you have the Helm Client and Tiller successfully installed, you can move on to using Helm to manage charts.