Helm in Practice

Debugging and Colored Output

When you want to troubleshoot problems with Helm commands, you can enable debug output by setting the HELM_DEBUG environment variable to true. This provides more detailed logs about what Helm is doing behind the scenes. Among other things, it shows the exact Kubernetes manifests being sent to the API server after template rendering. For example, to see debug output when installing a chart, you can run:

export HELM_DEBUG="true"
# or use
# export HELM_DEBUG=1

# Then run the install command
helm install my-wordpress bitnami/wordpress \
  --version 28.0.2

# Don't forget to unset the variable afterward
unset HELM_DEBUG

To see the rendered manifests, search for the COMPUTED VALUES: section in the debug output.