Helm commands show forbidden

When Helm is initiated in the cluster without specifying the correct ServiceAccount, the command helm init will succeed but you won’t be able to execute most of the other helm commands. The following error will be shown:

  1. Error: configmaps is forbidden: User "system:serviceaccount:kube-system:default" cannot list configmaps in the namespace "kube-system"

To resolve this, the server component (tiller) needs to be removed and added with the correct ServiceAccount. You can use helm reset --force to remove the tiller from the cluster. Please check if it is removed using helm version --server.

  1. helm reset --force
  2. Tiller (the Helm server-side component) has been uninstalled from your Kubernetes Cluster.
  3. helm version --server
  4. Error: could not find tiller

When you have confirmed that tiller has been removed, please follow the steps provided in Initialize Helm (Install tiller) to install tiller with the correct ServiceAccount.