2.7 KiB
Kubernetes Helm
Helm is a tool for managing Kubernetes charts. Charts are packages of pre-configured Kubernetes resources.
Use Helm to...
- Find and use popular software packaged as Kubernetes charts
- Share your own applications as Kubernetes charts
- Create reproducible builds of your Kubernetes applications
- Intelligently manage your Kubernetes manifest files
- Manage releases of Helm packages
Helm in a Handbasket
Helm is a tool that streamlines installing and managing Kubernetes applications. Think of it like apt/yum/homebrew for Kubernetes.
- Helm has two parts: a client (
helm
) and a server (tiller
) - Tiller runs inside of your Kubernetes cluster, and manages releases (installations) of your charts.
- Helm runs on your laptop, CI/CD, or wherever you want it to run.
- Charts are Helm packages that contain at least two things:
- A description of the package (
Chart.yaml
) - One or more templates, which contain Kubernetes manifest files
- A description of the package (
- Charts can be stored on disk, or fetched from remote chart repositories (like Debian or RedHat packages)
Docs
Install
Download a release tarball of helm and tiller for your platform. Unpack the helm
and tiller
binaries and add them to your PATH and you are good to go! OS X/Cask users can brew cask install helm
.
Install from source
To install Helm from source, follow this process:
Make sure you have the prerequisites:
- Go 1.6
- A running Kubernetes cluster
kubectl
properly configured to talk to your cluster- Glide 0.10 or greater with both git and mercurial installed.
- Properly set your $GOPATH
- Clone (or otherwise download) this repository into $GOPATH/src/k8s.io/helm
- Run
make bootstrap build
You will now have two binaries built:
bin/helm
is the clientbin/tiller
is the server
From here, you can run bin/helm
and use it to install a recent snapshot of
Tiller. Helm will use your kubectl
config to learn about your cluster.
For development on Tiller, you can locally run Tiller, or you build a Docker
image (make docker-build
) and then deploy it (helm init -i IMAGE_NAME
).
The documentation folder contains more information about the architecture and usage of Helm/Tiller.