Helm Charts
The canonical source for Helm charts is the Helm Hub, an aggregator for distributed chart repos.
This GitHub project is the source for Helm stable and incubator Helm chart repositories, currently listed on the Hub.
For more information about installing and using Helm, see the Helm Docs. For a quick introduction to Charts, see the Chart Guide.
Status of the Project
Similar to the Helm 2 Support Plan, this GitHub project has begun transition to a 1 year "maintenance mode" (see Deprecation Timeline below). Given the deprecation plan, this project is intended for apiVersion: v1 Charts (installable by both Helm 2 and 3), and not for apiVersion: v2 charts (installable by Helm 3 only).
Deprecation Timeline
| Nov 13, 2019 | At Helm 3's public release, new charts are no longer accepted to stable or incubator. Patches to existing charts may continue to be submitted by the community, and (time permitting) reviewed by chart OWNERS for acceptance |
| Aug 13, 2020 | At 9 months – when Helm v2 goes security fix only – the stable and incubator repos will be de-listed from the Helm Hub. Chart OWNERS are encouraged to accept security fixes only. |
| Nov 13, 2020 | At 1 year, support for this project will formally end, at which point the stable and incubator chart repos will be marked obsolete. At that time these chart repos will likely be garbage collected and no longer available. This git repository will remain as an archive. |
This timeline gives the community (chart OWNERS, organizations, groups or individuals who want to host charts) 9 months to move charts to new Helm repos, and list these new repos on the Helm Hub before stable and incubator are de-listed.
Note that this project has been under active development for some time, so you might run into issues. If you do, please don't be shy about letting us know, or better yet, contribute a fix or feature (within the deprecation timeline of course). Also be aware the repo and chart OWNERS are volunteers so reviews are as time allows, and acceptance is up to the chart OWNERS - you may reach out but please be patient and courteous.
Where to Find Us
For general Helm Chart discussions join the Helm Charts (#charts) room in the Kubernetes Slack instance.
For issues and support for Helm and Charts see Support Channels.
How Do I Install These Charts?
Just helm install stable/<chart>. This is the default repository for Helm which is located at https://kubernetes-charts.storage.googleapis.com/ and is installed by default.
For more information on using Helm, refer to the Helm documentation.
How Do I Enable the Stable Repository for Helm 3?
To add the Helm Stable Charts for your local client, run helm repo add:
$ helm repo add stable https://kubernetes-charts.storage.googleapis.com
"stable" has been added to your repositories
How Do I Enable the Incubator Repository?
To add the Incubator charts for your local client, run helm repo add:
$ helm repo add incubator https://kubernetes-charts-incubator.storage.googleapis.com
"incubator" has been added to your repositories
You can then run helm search incubator to see the charts.
Chart Format
Take a look at the alpine example chart for reference when you're writing your first few charts.
Before contributing a Chart, become familiar with the format. Note that the project is still under active development and the format may still evolve a bit.
Repository Structure
This GitHub repository contains the source for the packaged and versioned charts released in the gs://kubernetes-charts Google Storage bucket (the Chart Repository).
The Charts in the stable/ directory in the master branch of this repository match the latest packaged Chart in the Chart Repository, though there may be previous versions of a Chart available in that Chart Repository.
The purpose of this repository is to provide a place for maintaining and contributing official Charts, with CI processes in place for managing the releasing of Charts into the Chart Repository.
The Charts in this repository are organized into two folders:
- stable
- incubator
Stable Charts meet the criteria in the technical requirements.
Incubator Charts are those that do not meet these criteria. Having the incubator folder allows charts to be shared and improved on until they are ready to be moved into the stable folder. The charts in the incubator/ directory can be found in the gs://kubernetes-charts-incubator Google Storage Bucket.
In order to get a Chart from incubator to stable, Chart maintainers should open a pull request that moves the chart folder.
Contributing to an Existing Chart
We'd love for you to contribute to an existing Chart that you find provides a useful application or service for Kubernetes. Please read our Contribution Guide for more information on how you can contribute Charts.
Note: We use the same workflow, License and Contributor License Agreement as the main Kubernetes repository.
Owning and Maintaining A Chart
Individual charts can be maintained by one or more users of GitHub. When someone maintains a chart they have the access to merge changes to that chart. To have merge access to a chart someone needs to:
- Be listed on the chart, in the
Chart.yamlfile, as a maintainer. If you need sponsors and have contributed to the chart, please reach out to the existing maintainers, or if you are having trouble connecting with them, please reach out to one of the OWNERS of the charts repository. - Be invited (and accept your invite) as a read-only collaborator on this repo. This is required for @k8s-ci-robot PR comment interaction.
- An OWNERS file needs to be added to a chart. That OWNERS file should list the maintainers' GitHub login names for both the reviewers and approvers sections. For an example see the Drupal chart. The
OWNERSfile should also be appended to the.helmignorefile.
Once these three steps are done a chart approver can merge pull requests following the directions in the REVIEW_GUIDELINES.md file.
Trusted Collaborator
The pull-charts-e2e test run, that installs a chart to test it, is required before a pull request can be merged. These tests run automatically for members of the Helm Org and for chart repository collaborators. For regular contributors who are trusted, in a manner similar to Kubernetes community members, we have trusted collaborators. These individuals can have their tests run automatically as well as mark other pull requests as ok to test by adding a comment of /ok-to-test on pull requests.
There are two paths to becoming a trusted collaborator. One only needs follow one of them.
- If you are a Kubernetes GitHub org member and have your Kubernetes org membership public you can become a trusted collaborator for Helm Charts
- Get sponsorship from one of the Charts Maintainers listed in the OWNERS file at the root of this repository
The process to get added is:
- File an issue asking to be a trusted collaborator
- A Helm Chart Maintainer can then add the user as a read only collaborator to the repository
Review Process
For information related to the review procedure used by the Chart repository maintainers, see Merge approval and release process.
Stale Pull Requests and Issues
Pull Requests and Issues that have no activity for 30 days automatically become stale. After 30 days of being stale, without activity, they become rotten. Pull Requests and Issues can rot for 30 days and then they are automatically closed. This is the standard stale process handling for all repositories on the Kubernetes GitHub organization.
Supported Kubernetes Versions
This chart repository supports the latest and previous minor versions of Kubernetes. For example, if the latest minor release of Kubernetes is 1.8 then 1.7 and 1.8 are supported. Charts may still work on previous versions of Kubernertes even though they are outside the target supported window.
To provide that support the API versions of objects should be those that work for both the latest minor release and the previous one.
Happy Helming in China
If you are in China, there are some problems to use upstream Helm Charts directly (e.g. images hosted on gcr.io, quay.io, and Charts hosted on googleapis.com etc), you can use this mirror repo at https://github.com/cloudnativeapp/charts which automatically sync & replace unavailable image & repo URLs in every Chart.