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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 Binary Releases
Every release of Helm provides binary releases for a variety of OSes. These binary versions can be manually downloaded and installed.
- Download your desired version
- Unpack it (
tar -zxvf helm-v2.0.0-linux-amd64.tgz
) - 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 Canary Builds
"Canary" builds are versions of the Helm software that are built from the latest master branch. They are not official releases, and may not be stable. However, they offer the opportunity to test the cutting edge features.
Canary Helm binaries are stored in the Kubernetes Helm GCS bucket. Here are links to the common builds:
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 with glide and Mercurial installed.
$ 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.
You can explicitly tell helm init
to...
- Install the canary build with the
--canary-image
flag - Install a particular image (version) with
--tiller-image
- Install to a particular cluster with
--kube-context
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.)
Installing Tiller Canary Builds
Canary images are built from the master
branch. They may not be
stable, but they offer you the chance to test out the latest features.
The easiest way to install a canary image is to use helm init
with the
--canary-image
flag:
$ helm init --canary-image
This will use the most recently built container image. You can always
uninstall Tiller by deleting the Tiller deployment from the
kube-system
namespace using kubectl
.
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.
Deleting or Reinstalling Tiller
Because Tiller stores its data in Kubernetes ConfigMaps, you can safely
delete and re-install Tiller without worrying about losing any data. The
recommended way of deleting Tiller is with kubectl delete deployment tiller-deployment --namespace kube-system
To simply update Tiller to run the latest image, you can run this command:
$ export TILLER_TAG=v2.0.0-beta.1 # Or whatever version you want
$ kubectl --namespace=kube-system set image deployments/tiller-deploy tiller=gcr.io/kubernetes-helm/tiller:$TILLER_TAG
deployment "tiller-deploy" image updated
Setting TILLER_TAG=canary
will get the latest snapshot of master.
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.