Helm in Practice

Repository and Registry Config Paths

Helm Config Paths

Helm uses HELM_CONFIG_HOME to determine where to store its configuration files. In our example, it is set to /root/.config/helm, which is the default location for the current user (root in this case).

In this configuration folder, we will find the repositories.yaml file, which is also configured by HELM_REPOSITORY_CONFIG and lists all the Helm chart repositories we have added. This is an example of how the file looks after adding a couple of repositories (Bitnami and a private repo):

repositories:
- name: bitnami
  url: https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
  username: ""
  password: ""
  caFile: ""
  certFile: ""
  insecure_skip_tls_verify: false
  keyFile: ""
  pass_credentials_all: false
- name: my-private-repo
  url: https://my-private-repo.example.com/charts
  username: "my-username"
  password: "my-secret-password"
  caFile: "/path/to/ca.crt"
  certFile: "/path/to/cert.crt"
  keyFile: "/path/to/key.key"
  insecure_skip_tls_verify: false
  pass_credentials_all: true
# ... more repositories ...

This file is created and updated automatically when you run commands like helm repo add, helm repo remove, or helm repo update. It references each repository using the following key-value pairs:

• name: The short name used to refer to the repository within Helm.

• url: The base URL where the chart repository is hosted.

• username: The username for HTTP basic authentication (empty for public repos).

• password: The password for HTTP basic authentication.

• caFile: Path to a custom CA certificate used to verify the repository's TLS certificate.

• certFile: Path to a client certificate used for mutual TLS authentication, if required by the repository.

• keyFile: Path to the private key that pairs with certFile for mutual TLS.