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Quickstart Guide

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

Prerequisites

You must have Kubernetes installed. We recommend version 1.4.1 or later.
You should also have a local configured copy of kubectl.

Helm will figure out where to install Tiller by reading your Kubernetes configuration file (usually $HOME/.kube/config). This is the same file that kubectl uses.

To find out which cluster Tiller would install to, you can run kubectl config current-context or kubectl cluster-info.

$ kubectl config current-context
my-cluster

If your cluster has Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) enabled, you may want to configure a service account and rules before proceeding.

Install Helm

Download a binary release of the Helm client. You can use tools like homebrew, or look at the official releases page.

For more details, or for other options, see the installation guide.

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

This will install Tiller into the Kubernetes cluster you saw with kubectl config current-context.

TIP: Want to install into a different cluster? Use the --kube-context flag.

TIP: When you want to upgrade Tiller, just run helm init --upgrade.

By default, when Tiller is installed,it does not have authentication enabled. To learn more about configuring strong TLS authentication for Tiller, consult the Tiller TLS guide.

Install an Example Chart

To install a chart, you can run the helm install command. Helm has several ways to find and install a chart, but the easiest is to use one of the official stable charts.

$ helm repo update              # Make sure we get the latest list of charts
$ helm install stable/mysql
Released smiling-penguin

In the example above, the stable/mysql chart was released, and the name of our new release is smiling-penguin. You get a simple idea of the features of this MySQL chart by running helm inspect stable/mysql.

Whenever you install a chart, a new release is created. So one chart can be installed multiple times into the same cluster. And each can be independently managed and upgraded.

The helm install command is a very powerful command with many capabilities. To learn more about it, check out the Using Helm Guide

Learn About Releases

It's easy to see what has been released using Helm:

$ helm ls
NAME           	VERSION	 UPDATED                       	STATUS         	CHART
smiling-penguin	 1      	Wed Sep 28 12:59:46 2016      	DEPLOYED       	mysql-0.1.0

The helm list function will show you a list of all deployed releases.

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
...

Because Helm tracks your releases even after you've deleted them, you can audit a cluster's history, and even undelete a release (with helm rollback).

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

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