Run checks for chart version metadata update as GH Action

[kocolosk]

We often have Pull Requests that could be merged but are missing the make publish step. At a minimum we can check for that as part of the PR validation.

[colearendt]

Worth noting that the helm project has some nice CI tooling available:

• chart-testing-action
• chart-releaser-action
• (as well as the CLIs that make it possible / easy to use)

In practice, it has the benefit of avoiding the make publish requirement, and will fail if version conflicts, etc. automatically on your behalf.

It is worth noting that it does have a bit of a different deployment mechanism: using GitHub Releases rather than a directory of tarballs in the repository itself. If you want to see an example, we use here:

https://github.com/rstudio/helm/

[colearendt]

The more I think about this, the more I feel like having the tarballs in the git repository is less than ideal. There is no guarantee that any particular tarball matches the contents of what is in the repository at a given version/time (for instance). Much better to use the GitHub release mechanism to tie the GitHub sources to the released code.

I am happy to help get this set up if this seems like something that would be worthwhile. I suspect we could backfill older releases to ensure backwards compatibility as well.

[kocolosk]

I completely agree! I'd be quite happy to use Releases here, particularly if someone has already gone through the work of generating a Helm-friendly index that points to them.

We're operating in a bit of a gray area with respect to ASF Releases. This chart started out as something that lived on the Helm side of things, and so clearly wasn't in scope as part of Apache CouchDB. Now it's using an ASF-maintained GitHub org, but we still don't include it as part of the CouchDB source distro. I would say let's go ahead and pursue the GH Releases approach.

If you've got the time to hack on it, great! I'd appreciate it.

@willholley any concerns?

[colearendt]

Worth noting this commit: 930c909172470e39ae7bb9efc9abaac35176cea3

Which discusses moving from the gh-pages branch. It's not clear to me whether GitHub Actions and CI as a part of the wider helm community makes this a worthwhile "switch back" or not 😄

The plan that I imagine:

• write a "backfill" script that will move all of the existing .tar.gz files into GitHub releases
  • my thought on how to do this is write a script that:
  • gets the last commit that a .tar.gz was added to docs/
  • presume that the git state for the charts/ directory was correct at that point (i.e. Chart.yaml updated, etc.). Plan to check that this is the case, but any other changes would be harder to detect. If there are concerns here, we could always SHA the files in the .tar.gz and compare to the git state
  • check out that commit, and use the chart-releaser to create a GitHub release with that tag, packaged .tar.gz, etc.
• add the GitHub actions to maintain things going forwards
• Sanity check whether the first run of the GitHub action will populate the index.yaml properly (w/ backfill). If not, we may need to build the index.yaml from scratch, as we do here

Any thoughts / feedback on this approach? I don't have access to do these things, so thought I would just PR with the appropriate bits and y'all can check / merge / run the manual pieces when convenient.

[willholley]

@colearendt thanks for digging into this. Moving to GH Actions and Releases to align with the Helm community totally makes sense. If you're able to PR the changes, I can run the manual steps as required.

[colearendt]

Sounds good! @willholley I created the scripts with the manual steps for backfill (here: https://github.com/apache/couchdb-helm/pull/79). My next step will be to PR the CI changes. One potential downside of this approach is that outstanding branches will likely need to change how they have handled the release process, and there will be a handful of docs changes needed 🙈 Not sure if docs are something you are comfortable merging piecemeal or if it should be handled in the same PR as the CI changes.

[colearendt]

Just added the PR for GitHub Actions additions too: https://github.com/apache/couchdb-helm/pull/80

Looking forward to discussing at your convenience!

[willholley]

@colearendt we're going to need to make some modifications to the workflows to align with ASF policy - apologies I hadn't picked up on this earlier. The lint/test stages are currently failing e.g. https://github.com/apache/couchdb-helm/actions/runs/2516645843

Broadly, I think we need to:

1. Bring in the helm/chart-testing-action and helm/kind-action as submodules and update the workflows to use them.
2. Specify the minimum permissions for each workflow

[colearendt]

Awesome! I’ll take a look - apologies for the trouble!

[colearendt]

Created PR to address w/ some discussion: https://github.com/apache/couchdb-helm/pull/87