HELM — Kubernetes Package Manager
As Every devops person knows that Kubernetes is a part of this Devops Culture and is known as an Orchestration Software. Docker is a containerization software. The Difference is Kubernetes is used to manage the containers like Docker. Apart from that it is also used to Simplify the Application workflows and its complexities. To overcome the complexities Kubernetes (K8s) comes up with Open source tool called Helm. This Helm is mainly used for packaging and deploying applications on K8s and has widely been adopted by its community CNCF(Cloud Native Computing Foundation)
Helm supports operations like Install, remove, upgrade and rollback. It is one of the ways to simplify the application deployment. Helm can be defined using declarative resource files for different Kubernetes objects like Deployment, services, configmaps and PersistentVolumeClaims. Helm packages all the resources of Kubernetes into a format called Charts.
A chart can be considered as a kubernetes package. This packaging contains information about files, dependencies and metadata . Here Dependencies consists of Library files and executable files . Installation of Helm can be done on Windows, Linux and macOS
On Windows to install use Chocolatey and the command is as given below
choco install kubernetes-helm
On macOS use Homebrew
$brew install helm
Similarly for Linux environment use package managers like yum,dnf,apt etc.. If Ubuntu is used then following command can be used to install Helm $ sudo apt install helm
Apart from the above mentioned commands Helm can be directly downloaded from GitHub repository
It can be verified by using the simple command $helm version
Helm Environment Variables
Helm allows configuring the following variables
HELM_BIN
HELM_NAMESPACE
HELM_DEBUG
HELM_PLUGINS
HELM_KUBEAPISERVER
HELM_REGISTRY_CONFIG
HELM_KUBECONTEXT
HELM_REPOSITORY_CONFIG
HELM_KUBETOKEN
