Practical Helm Charts For Beginners

Learn to install the lab environment for practical helm charts, including Docker Desktop, Kubernetes, and the helm CLI, with macOS and Windows guidance and access to unit tests.

Install Docker desktop on macOS for Apple and Intel systems, including M1, then verify with docker run hello world.

Download the lab git repository to access example charts and exercises; clone with ssh or https and cd into the Helm Labs directory to begin.

Explore the basic components of a helm chart template, including templates in the templates directory, go template actions, and how values.yaml drives rendered Kubernetes manifests like a configmap.

Explore how to override values.yaml at runtime using dash dash set and helm template, enabling unique names per namespace, multiple configmaps, and chart customization without editing files.

Learn how to use the helm status command with a single argument, the release name, to view key-value details for a specific release.

Learn to use helm rollback to revert a release to a previous version after a failed upgrade, completing the chart lifecycle with verification via helm git manifest.

Explore how Kubernetes secrets power the Helm CLI, including secret types and release data, then inspect with helm history and perform cleanup with kubectl delete secret.

Conclude the cli section by showing how to manage helm releases across their life cycle and access command lists, including install and list, with helm --help.

Learn how helm actions, functions, and pipelines render templates. See how the quote function outputs strings and how dot values and built-in data are accessed.

Master string concatenation in helm by using the print function to build a final string for the manifest, and learn to leverage pipelines for consistent templating.

Discover how the nindent function in helm charts automatically adds a newline and indents a string within templates. Compare nindent with indent and choose your preferred style for templates.

Learn to use the helm quote function to enforce string values in templates, avoiding yaml booleans and numbers by quoting strings for Kubernetes manifests.

Learn to extract string parts in helm with the Substr function. Use three arguments, start and end indices (zero-based, inclusive start, exclusive end), and the target string for pipeline-friendly results.

Learn to switch strings among snakecase, camel case, and kebab case using helm functions, and apply these conversions in manifests and values for Helm charts.

Learn how helm handles numbers in chart templates by using integers and floats, performing arithmetic with functions, and using dot notation for whole and decimal parts.

Explore how helm compares numbers using six boolean functions, such as gt, g, lt, l, eq, and ne, and apply these primitives in control flow.

Learn how to use helm's with statement to set a local cursor in templates, switch to the values object with dot notation, and restore the previous cursor at end.

Explore the ternary function as an expression that resolves to a value, selecting between two results based on a condition, with examples in JavaScript, Java, and Helm.

Explore lists in the helm template language as ordered collections for Kubernetes manifests, including containers, volumes, and secrets, and learn helm functions across values.yaml and Go slices.

Learn to use variable names with the range action in helm templates. Set a named variable after range with the colon equals operator and iterate a list using item variable.

Learn to use the range action in Helm to capture both index and item while iterating a list, with index coming first and an example printing 'index: item'.

Learn to use the Helm length function to safely access list elements and avoid errors. Implement if-else logic to provide fallbacks when the list is too short.

Learn to slice lists in Go by using the slice syntax to return a part of a list, with start and end indices, including examples and end-exclusive behavior.

Learn how to add elements to a list in Helm using append and prepend, each taking a list and a new element, for end or start insertion.

Learn how to print lists in helm templates using json and the two yaml functions, handle indentation, and ensure valid yaml or json output in helm manifests.

Learn how to compare lists in helm using deep equal instead of the standard equal, enabling value equality checks for lists and dictionaries and avoiding non comparable type errors.

Explore the sort alpha function in Helm templates, which sorts lists of strings alphabetically. It works only on strings and there is no general purpose sort function in Helm.

Walk through the list lab, opening template and test files, running the test suite, and fixing list properties with to yaml, indent, range, first, index, and without.

Add a dictionary item in Helm templates using the set function, supplying the dictionary, key, and value; override existing keys and assign to a variable to avoid extra prints.

Learn how the omit function in helm templates removes multiple keys from a dictionary, always returns a new dictionary, and differs from unset by not modifying the original.

Learn how the helm split function from sprig returns a dictionary of results keyed by _0, _1, _2, and how it differs from the split list function.