Part 2: Helm

Part 2: Helm

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes. A Helm chart is a directory of templated YAML files plus a values file. You write the templates once, then deploy multiple instances with different values.

Treat Helm as a package manager. It works well for pulling in third-party charts with one or two commands. For your own manifests, Kustomize is simpler and more pleasant to work with.

Packaging with Helm

Creating Your First Chart

# Scaffold a new chart
helm create my-site

# Look at what was generated
tree my-site/

The scaffold gives you:

• Chart.yaml — metadata (name, version, description)
• values.yaml — default configuration values
• templates/ — Kubernetes manifests with Go template syntax
• templates/deployment.yaml — the main workload
• templates/service.yaml — network access to your pods
• templates/ingress.yaml — external access rules

values.yaml

The key fields to focus on first:

# values.yaml (trimmed to essentials)
replicaCount: 1

image:
  repository: nginx
  tag: "latest"
  pullPolicy: IfNotPresent

service:
  type: ClusterIP
  port: 80

ingress:
  enabled: true
  className: traefik
  hosts:
    - host: mysite.example.com
      paths:
        - path: /
          pathType: Prefix
  tls:
    - secretName: mysite-tls
      hosts:
        - mysite.example.com

Instead of one values.yaml, later we will create one per environment. The chart stays the same; only the values change:

my-site/
  Chart.yaml
  values.yaml          # defaults
  values-dev.yaml      # local dev overrides
  values-staging.yaml  # staging overrides
  values-prod.yaml     # production overrides

Summary

Helm is a package manager. Use it to install third-party charts. Use Kustomize for everything else — see Helm vs Kustomize for the full comparison.