Quickstart Guide

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

Prerequisites

The following prerequisites are required for a successful and properly secureduse of Helm.

  • A Kubernetes cluster
  • Deciding what security configurations to apply to your installation, if any
  • Installing and configuring Helm.

Install Kubernetes or have access to a cluster

  • You must have Kubernetes installed. For the latest release of Helm, werecommend the latest stable release of Kubernetes, which in most cases is thesecond-latest minor release.
  • You should also have a local configured copy of kubectl.NOTE: Kubernetes versions prior to 1.6 have limited or no support for role-basedaccess controls (RBAC).

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 installationguide.

Initialize a Helm Chart Repository

Once you have Helm ready, you can add a chart repository. One popular startinglocation is the official Helm stable charts:

  1. $ helm repo add stable https://kubernetes-charts.storage.googleapis.com/

Once this is installed, you will be able to list the charts you can install:

  1. helm search repo stable
  2. NAME                                    CHART VERSION   APP VERSION                     DESCRIPTION
  3. stable/acs-engine-autoscaler            2.2.2           2.1.1                           DEPRECATED Scales worker nodes within agent pools
  4. stable/aerospike                        0.2.8           v4.5.0.5                        A Helm chart for Aerospike in Kubernetes
  5. stable/airflow                          4.1.0           1.10.4                          Airflow is a platform to programmatically autho...
  6. stable/ambassador                       4.1.0           0.81.0                          A Helm chart for Datawire Ambassador
  7. # ... and many more

Install an Example Chart

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

  1. $ helm repo update              # Make sure we get the latest list of charts
  2. $ helm install stable/mysql --generate-name
  3. Released smiling-penguin

In the example above, the stable/mysql chart was released, and the name of ournew release is smiling-penguin.

You get a simple idea of the features of this MySQL chart by runninghelm show chart stable/mysql. Or you could run helm show all stable/mysqlto get all information about the chart.

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

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

Learn About Releases

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

  1. $ helm ls
  2. NAME             VERSION   UPDATED                   STATUS    CHART
  3. 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 uninstall command:

  1. $ helm uninstall smiling-penguin
  2. Removed smiling-penguin

This will uninstall smiling-penguin from Kubernetes, which will remove allresources associated with the release as well as the release history.

If the flag —keep-history is provided, release history will be kept. You willbe able to request information about that release:

  1. $ helm status smiling-penguin
  2. Status: UNINSTALLED
  3. ...

Because Helm tracks your releases even after you’ve uninstalled them, you canaudit 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 acommand followed by the -h flag:

  1. $ helm get -h