Helmfile

Deploy Kubernetes Helm Charts

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About

Helmfile is a declarative spec for deploying helm charts. It lets you...

• Keep a directory of chart value files and maintain changes in version control.
• Apply CI/CD to configuration changes.
• Periodically sync to avoid skew in environments.

To avoid upgrades for each iteration of helm, the helmfile executable delegates to helm - as a result, helm must be installed.

Highlights

Declarative: Write, version-control, apply the desired state file for visibility and reproducibility.

Modules: Modularize common patterns of your infrastructure, distribute it via Git, S3, etc. to be reused across the entire company (See #648)

Versatility: Manage your cluster consisting of charts, kustomizations, and directories of Kubernetes resources, turning everything to Helm releases (See #673)

Patch: JSON/Strategic-Merge Patch Kubernetes resources before helm-installing, without forking upstream charts (See #673)

Status

May 2025 Update

• Helmfile v1.x has migrated its YAML processing library from goccy/go-yaml to gopkg.in/yaml.v3 as the default and only supported backend. This change simplifies YAML handling and improves compatibility with the broader Go ecosystem.
• We are excited about the wide adoption for Helmfile v1 users! If you haven't already upgraded, please go over this v1 proposal here and the latest rc release in the releases page.

Installation

1: Binary Installation

download one of releases

2: Package Manager

• Archlinux: install via pacman -S helmfile
• openSUSE: install via zypper in helmfile assuming you are on Tumbleweed; if you are on Leap you must add the kubic repo for your distribution version once before that command, e.g. zypper ar https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/kubic/openSUSE_Leap_\$releasever kubic
• Windows (using scoop): scoop install helmfile
• macOS (using homebrew): brew install helmfile

3: Container

For more details, see run as a container

Make sure to run helmfile init once after installation. Helmfile uses the helm-diff plugin.

Getting Started

Let's start with a simple helmfile and gradually improve it to fit your use-case!

Suppose the helmfile.yaml representing the desired state of your helm releases looks like:

repositories:
- name: prometheus-community
  url: https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts

releases:
- name: prom-norbac-ubuntu
  namespace: prometheus
  chart: prometheus-community/prometheus
  set:
  - name: rbac.create
    value: false

Sync your Kubernetes cluster state to the desired one by running:

helmfile apply

Congratulations! You now have your first Prometheus deployment running inside your cluster.

Iterate on the helmfile.yaml by referencing:

• Configuration
• CLI reference
• Helmfile Best Practices Guide

More complex examples

See: multi-env-helmfile

Docs

Please read complete documentation

Contributing

Welcome to contribute together to make helmfile better: contributing doc

Attribution

We use:

• semtag for automated semver tagging. I greatly appreciate the author(pnikosis)'s effort on creating it and their kindness to share it!

Users

Helmfile has been used by many users in production:

• gitlab.com
• reddit.com
• Jenkins
• ...

For more users, please see: Users

License

MIT

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