Helm Chart Starter

Project Outline

Project Goals

Make it simple to produce the necessary boilerplate for Kubernetes helm charts

Similar Work

https://github.com/kubernetes/helm/blob/master/pkg/chartutil/create.go

Justification

Helm has an existing default chart that it generates. However, more specific guidelines are applied to this chart, and there is no way to configure the default Helm chart. See:

Summary

• License: MIT
• Language: en-GB

Installation

$ git clone https://github.com/sitewards/helm-chart ${HOME}/.helm/starters/sitewards/chart

Updates

I update these templates regularly. If you need to fetch the newer version, cd into the directory and run the git pull.

$ cd ${HOME}/.helm/starters/sitewards/chart
$ git pull

Usage

Helm allows the usage of a "template" chart when creating other charts, as follows:

$ helm create ${CHART_NAME} --starter=sitewards/chart 

Please note: For some reason, older versions of helm created the charts where the files are executable. If this affects your chart, to fix this, run:

$ find . -type f  -exec chmod 644 {} \;

This lets us "pre-populate" a chart with much of the boilerplate that is repeated across all projects. Anything that we know to be unique has a placeholder of the format __PLACEHOLDER__, and anything that needs further attention once the chart has been generated should have a todo and extensive documentation.

Not all documentation has been finished.

A list of the __ placeholders and their intended purpose is below:

• __NAME__: The human readable name of the chart of the form /A-Za-z-_ / e.g. Sitewards GmbH
• __CHART__: The reference of the chart of the form /a-z/ e.g. linkerd.
• __CONTAINER_NAME__: The name of the application container of the form a-z e.g. kubectl
• __CONTAINER_IMAGE__: The image ref of the container to be used of the form /a-z.\//-_ e.g. quay.io/littlemanco/apache-php

Development

There are various parts of the charts that cannot be automatically generated, and will require a user to make these decisions. However, since Helm is a newer technology and not all users are as well versed with either it, or Kubernetes, the sections have been heavily documented. The documentation follows the same syntax as the values.yaml syntax that seems common in upstream helm. A commented out code line that is supposed to be included looks as follows, with a single # character

# thisIsACommentedOutCodeLine: "value"

A comment that explains the purpose of this code, or other helpful information has two ## characters

## This is explanatory text, that indicates what is going on with a given line of code.

Not all of the charts are fully documented yet. As I find the need to go back and check documentation, I'm updating it in the starter chart.

Thanks

https://github.com/kubernetes/helm

Contributing

Contributions are always welcome! Nothing is too small, and the best place to start is to open an issue.

References

• Lingoes.net,. (2015). Language Code Table. Retrieved 4 June 2015, from http://www.lingoes.net/en/translator/langcode.htm
• Gist. (2017). Honestbee Helm conventions. [online] Available at: https://gist.github.com/so0k/f927a4b60003cedd101a0911757c605a [Accessed 31 Jan. 2017].