Helm Chart Repository Deprecation Update
Fri, Oct 30, 2020
Back in 2019, when the Helm v2 support timeline and end of life plan was announced, the deprecation of the helm/charts GitHub repository was announced, as well. The primary reason for the deprecation is the significant increase in upkeep for the repo maintainers. Over the last couple of years the number of charts under maintainance increased from ~100 to 300+ causing a commensurate increase in pull requests and updates to the repo. Unfortunately, despite many efforts to automate review and maintenance tasks, the amount of time available from maintainers has not increased.
When we announced the deprecation we also began to share the tools and guidance that we had used to maintain the helm/charts repo. For folks that want to host and maintain their own repositories you now have these tools available to streamline the process:
- Chart Testing provides linting and testing for PRs against your charts
- Chart Releaser provides tooling to help you host your own chart repo with GitHub Releases and Pages used to host your artifacts
- Testing and Releasing Github Actions to automate the tooling described above using GitHub Actions
With these tools available we've enabled many charts to migrate to their own repositories for active maintenance.
Key Dates and Recommended Actions
There has been refinement to the plans and confusion/questions about what happens next, so we wanted to provide a timeline of key events and recommended actions moving forward:
- Nov 2, 2020 - READMEs for all non-deprecated charts will get a note added, stating that they will no longer be updated
- RECOMMENDED ACTION - If you depend on a chart in the Charts repository look for the new official location. If one does not exist, consider adopting the chart.
- Nov 6, 2020 the stable and incubator charts repos will be removed from the
Artifact Hub
- RECOMMENDED ACTION - None
- Nov 13, 2020 - CI on the
helm/charts repository will be disabled and no more Pull Requests will be accpeted.
- RECOMMENDED ACTION - For more info on the ongoing initiative to relocate charts to new repos please see this issue.
- After Nov 13, 2020 - Downloads of Charts at their old locations will be re-directed to the read-only archive available in GitHub Pages. The old locations may no longer be available after this date.
- RECOMMENDED ACTION - See info on switching to the archived stable and incubator charts. Keep in mind that these charts will no longer be updated with bug fixes or security patches.
