Quickstart Guide
This guide covers how you can quickly get started using Helm.
Prerequisites
The following prerequisites are required for a successful and properly secured use 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, we recommend the latest stable release of Kubernetes, which in most cases is the second-latest minor release.
- You should also have a local configured copy of
kubectl
.
See the Helm Version Support Policy for the maximum version skew supported between Helm and Kubernetes.
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 installation guide.
Initialize a Helm Chart Repository
Once you have Helm ready, you can add a chart repository. Check Artifact Hub for available Helm chart repositories.
$ helm repo add stable https://charts.helm.sh/stable
Once this is installed, you will be able to list the charts you can install:
$ helm search repo stable
NAME CHART VERSION APP VERSION DESCRIPTION
stable/acs-engine-autoscaler 2.2.2 2.1.1 DEPRECATED Scales worker nodes within agent pools
stable/aerospike 0.2.8 v4.5.0.5 A Helm chart for Aerospike in Kubernetes
stable/airflow 4.1.0 1.10.4 Airflow is a platform to programmatically autho...
stable/ambassador 4.1.0 0.81.0 A Helm chart for Datawire Ambassador
# ... and many more
Install an Example Chart
To install a chart, you can run the helm install
command. Helm has several
ways to find and install a chart, but the easiest is to use one of the official
stable
charts.
$ helm repo update # Make sure we get the latest list of charts
$ helm install stable/mysql --generate-name
Released smiling-penguin
In the example above, the stable/mysql
chart was released, and the name of our
new release is smiling-penguin
.
You get a simple idea of the features of this MySQL chart by running helm show chart stable/mysql
. Or you could run helm show all stable/mysql
to get all
information about the chart.
Whenever you install a chart, a new release is created. So one chart can be installed multiple times into the same cluster. And each can be independently managed and upgraded.
The helm install
command is a very powerful command with many capabilities. To
learn more about it, check out the
Using Helm Guide
Learn About Releases
It's easy to see what has been released using Helm:
$ helm ls
NAME VERSION UPDATED STATUS CHART
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:
$ helm uninstall smiling-penguin
Removed smiling-penguin
This will uninstall smiling-penguin
from Kubernetes, which will remove all
resources associated with the release as well as the release history.
If the flag --keep-history
is provided, release history will be kept. You will
be able to request information about that release:
$ helm status smiling-penguin
Status: UNINSTALLED
...
Because Helm tracks your releases even after you've uninstalled them, you can
audit 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 a
command followed by the -h
flag:
$ helm get -h