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, the following must be installed

• helm
• helm-diff

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 v1.0 and v1.1 has been released. We recommend upgrading directly to v1.1 if you are still using v0.x.
• If you haven't already upgraded, please go over this v1 proposal here to see a small list of breaking changes.

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
• Linux/macOS/Windows (using mise): mise use -g helmfile@latest

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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