Distribute your container App as a Package

Create and publish a Helm chart of your Kubernetes application.

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes and makes it simple to publish your app so that people can install it in three lines. For example with the Hue SQL Editor:

helm repo add gethue https://helm.gethue.com
helm repo update
helm install hue gethue/hue 

3-step process of packaging

In the Helm world, chart is synonym of the traditional packages or modules of the Python or JavaScript world.

To build the chart, simply use the package command from the root of your Helm chart. Using Hue Helm directory as an example:

git clone git@github.com:cloudera/hue.git
cd hue/tools/kubernetes/helm/
helm package hue

Then to publish it to the outside, index it and serve it in your Helm repository which can be a simple static Web server.

For example, here with an Apache server we copy it to the host:

scp hue-1.0.1.tgz root@101.200.100.200:/var/www/helm.gethue.com

Then connect to the server and index the package:

ssh root@101.200.100.200
cd /var/www/helm.gethue.com
helm repo index .

Note: those are manual steps but can obviously be automated. Also feel free to check your server logs to count how many people install it.

Then your users can start leveraging features from the Kubernetes world like rolling upgrades, metrics, tracing…

Happy Helming!