Learning Helm

Chapter 2. Using Helm

Helm provides a command-line tool, named helm, that makes available all the features necessary for working with Helm charts. In this chapter, we will discover the primary features of the helm client. Along the way, we’ll learn how Helm interacts with Kubernetes.

We will start by looking at how to install and configure Helm, and work our way through the main command groups in Helm. Then we will cover finding and learning about packages, and how to install, upgrade, and delete them.

Installing and Configuring the Helm Client

Helm provides a single command-line client that is capable of performing all of the main Helm tasks. This client is, appropriately enough, named helm. While there are many other tools that can work with Helm charts, this one is the official general-purpose tool maintained by the Helm core maintainers, and it is the subject of this chapter as well as the next.

The helm client is written in a programming language called Go. Unlike Python, JavaScript, or Ruby, Go is a compiled language. Once a Go program is compiled, you do not need any of the Go tools to run or otherwise work with the binary.

So we will first cover downloading and installing the static binary, and then we will briefly introduce the process for fetching and compiling from the Go source code, should you so desire.

Installing a Prebuilt Binary

Each time the Helm maintainers issue a new release of helm, the project provides new signed binary builds of helm for a number of common ...