Using a private github repo as helm chart repo (https access)

Helm is a nice package manager for Kubernetes. If you are using k8s specially in complex setups helm can help you in creating a nice release process.

In complex setups sometimes you need a private helm repository for your packages.

This is how you can use a github repo, public or private, as helm repo.

Create a helm chart repo in github

It is easy. Create a repo and for adding packages, follow these commands

$ helm package $YOUR_CHART_PATH/ # to build the tgz file and copy it here
$ helm repo index . # create or update the index.yaml for repo
$ git add .
$ git commit -m 'New chart version'
$ git push

Access your repo

At the moment helm only understand http(s) for repository servers. The following trick shows how you can have that in a private or public github repo without using gh-pages.

You might know that github has a raw view. So simply use the following:

$ helm repo add sample 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kmzfs/helm-repo-in-github/master/'
$ helm repo update
$ helm search aerospike
NAME             VERSION DESCRIPTION
sample/aerospike 0.1.2   A Helm chart for Aerospike in Kubernetes

and if you want to keep your repo private you can create a “Personal access tokens” and use it like:

$ helm repo add sample 'https://MY_PRIVATE_TOKEN@raw.githubusercontent.com/kmzfs/helm-repo-in-github/master/'

Just be careful who is creating the token and what is its level of access.

kmzfs/helm-repo-in-github