Create and Publish your helm chart in Gitlab

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#helm #gitlab | Mar 3, 2023

Creating Your Own Charts

The Chart Development Guide explains how to develop your own charts. But you can get started quickly by using the helm create command:

helm create mychart

Now there is a chart in ./mychart. You can edit it and create your own templates.
As you edit your chart, you can validate that it is well-formed by running helm lint.

helm lint mychart

When it’s time to package the chart up for distribution, you can run the helm package command:

helm install mychart ./mychart-0.1.0.tgz

And that chart can now easily be installed by helm install:

Publish a package

Once built, a chart can be uploaded to the desired channel with curl or helm cm-push:

$USERNAME: the GitLab username or the deploy token username.
$ACCESS_TOKEN: the personal access token or the deploy token.
$PROJECT_ID: the project ID (like 43417816).
$CHANNEL: the name of the channel (like stable).

Note: To authenticate to the Helm repository, you need either:

A personal access token with the scope set to api.
A deploy token with the scope set to read_package_registry, write_package_registry, or both.
A CI/CD job token.

With `curl`

export USERNAME=myusername
export ACCESS_TOKEN=mytoken
export PROJECT_ID=myprojectid
export CHANNEL=mychannel

# With curl
curl --request POST \
	--form '[email protected]' \
	--user $USERNAME:$ACCESS_TOKEN \
https://gitlab.example.com/api/v4/projects/$PROJECT_ID/packages/helm/api/$CHANNEL/charts

With the `helm cm-push` plugin

Install the Plugin:

helm plugin install https://github.com/chartmuseum/helm-push

Add repository, then push a chart to your repository

export USERNAME=myusername
export ACCESS_TOKEN=mytoken
export PROJECT_ID=myprojectid
export CHANNEL=stable
export PROJECT_NAME=partner-lab-docs
# With the helm cm-push plugin
helm repo add --username $USERNAME --password $ACCESS_TOKEN $PROJECT_NAME https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/$PROJECT_ID/packages/helm/$CHANNEL

helm cm-push mychart-0.1.0.tgz $PROJECT_NAME

Use CI/CD to publish a Helm package

To publish a Helm package automated through GitLab CI/CD, you can use CI_JOB_TOKEN in place of the personal access token in your commands.

image: curlimages/curl:latest

stages:
  - upload

upload:
  stage: upload
  script:
    - 'curl --request POST --user gitlab-ci-token:$CI_JOB_TOKEN --form "[email protected]" "${CI_API_V4_URL}/projects/${CI_PROJECT_ID}/packages/helm/api/<channel>/charts"'

References

Read more in the Helm documentation about these topics: