A standalone Helm charts repository

This solution allows you to maintain your own custom helm charts repository.

Mission statement

A Helm Charts repository is constructed on a index.yaml file, and optional charts packaged in a tgz tar format. You can easily create those file using helm repo index command to create the index.yaml file and helm package <chartname> to package your chart files into a tgz file.

However, while developing a chart, it turns a real hassle to repeat this process agian and again.

This project is solving this problem, by automating the packging and deployment process, in a similar way helm charts official repo does.

The How

The flow is as follows:

Develop and make changes to your Chart. Make sure to increase the chart vesion number.
Push changes to your git repoository.
A CI process is triggered, which packages the desired chart and publish it to the Chart Repository.

Technology stack

The repository

I used Azure Blob Storage for the repository persistancy. It allows to serve static files, which is exactly what we need for the repo. In addition it's very easy to upload files to it, and you can configure your repo to be private or public.

The following script will create a public blob:

# create a new resource group(unless you already have one)
az group create --name helmgroup --location "westeurope"

# create a storage account
az storage account create --resource-group helmgroup --name helmstorage --sku Standard_LRS

# create a container called 'repo' which grants public read access for blobs.
az storage container create --name repo --public-access blob

# generate a sas-token which will be used later to upload files.
az storage container generate-sas --name repo --expiry 2030-01-01 --permissions lrw

Your Code

This scripts expects to find a charts folder at the root of your project. If it's located in a different directory, simply chnage the path in the CI script.

Every time you will make changes to your Charts, the CI will automatically package and upload the chart to your chart repo.

I used Azure DevOps Pipelines to create a CI process which triggers on any changes to the charts folder. It can be modified very easily by changing the triggers or path sections. The CI file is azure-pipelines.yml. Modify the file and add the variables needed or add the variables from the settings.

Initialize your repo for the first time

Once your storage account is ready, generate an initial index.yaml file, and upload to the storage container:

cd charts
helm repo index .
az storage blob upload --container-name repo --file index.yaml --name index.yaml

Add your repo to helm. This is done only once.

helm repo add helm-repo https://<storgae-account>.blob.core.windows.net/<container-name>/

Using your new repo

Every time a new verion is deployed, to any repo, including the public repo, you first need to perform:

helm repo update

And now you can search and install charts:

helm repo list
helm search <chart-name>

Kubeapps support

Kubeapps is a web-based UI for deploying and managing applications in Kubernetes clusters. Among other cool stuff, Kubeapps allows you to browse and deploy Helm charts from custom chart repositories - such as the one we created here.

You can easily deploy Kubeapps to your cluster using the following ocmmand:

$ cat > custom-values.yaml <<EOF
apprepository:
  initialRepos:
  - name: my-repo
    url: https://<storgae-account>.blob.core.windows.net/<container-name>/
EOF
$ helm install --name kubeapps --namespace kubeapps bitnami/kubeapps -f custom-values.yaml

For more information visit Kubeapps getting started page

itye-msft / charts-repo