helm/docs/quickstart.md

Quickstart Guide

This guide covers how you can quickly get started using Helm.

Prerequisites

• You must have Kubernetes installed, and have a local configured copy of kubectl.

Install Helm

Download a binary release of the Helm client from the official project page.

Alternately, you can clone the GitHub project and build your own client from source. The quickest route to installing from source is to run make bootstrap build, and then use bin/helm.

Initialize Helm and Install Tiller

Once you have Helm ready, you can initialize the local CLI and also install Tiller into your Kubernetes cluster in one step:

$ helm init

Install an Example Chart

To install a chart, you can run the helm install command. Let's use an example chart from this repository. Make sure you are in the root directory of this repo.

$ helm install docs/examples/alpine
Released smiling-penguin

In the example above, the alpine chart was released, and the name of our new release is smiling-penguin. You can view the details of the chart we just installed by taking a look at the nginx chart in docs/examples/alpine/Chart.yaml.

Change a Default Chart Value

A nice feature of helm is the ability to change certain values of the package for the install. Let's install the nginx example from this repository but change the replicaCount to 7.

$ helm install --set replicaCount=7 docs/examples/nginx
happy-panda

You can view the chart for this example in docs/examples/nginx/Chart.yaml and the default values in docs/examples/nginx/values.yaml.

Learn About The Release

To find out about our release, run helm status:

$ helm status smiling-penguin
Status: DEPLOYED

Uninstall a Release

To uninstall a release, use the helm delete command:

$ helm delete smiling-penguin
Removed smiling-penguin

This will uninstall smiling-penguin from Kubernetes, but you will still be able to request information about that release:

$ helm status smiling-penguin
Status: DELETED

Reading the Help Text

To learn more about the available Helm commands, use helm help or type a command followed by the -h flag:

$ helm get -h