Helm in Practice

Installing and Testing the Chart Locally

After testing the chart locally, we can install it in our cluster using the helm install command and a custom values file. This will let us verify that the chart works as expected in a real Kubernetes environment. The installation will pull the image from our Harbor registry, which is protected with a login and a password. Therefore, in addition to the custom values file, we need to create a Docker registry secret and link it to the ServiceAccount used by our application Pods.

To do this, let's create a folder to store our custom values file:

# Create another directory to store the custom values file
mkdir -p $HOME/todo-chart-custom

Then, run the following command to create the custom values file:

# Create the custom values file
cat < $HOME/todo-chart-custom/values.yaml
replicaCount: 1
image:
  repository: $MASTER_PUBLIC_IP:30003/todo-app/todo-app
  tag: "1.0.0"
  pullPolicy: IfNotPresent
imagePullSecrets:
  - name: harbor-registry-secret
serviceAccount:
  create: true
  name: todo-chart-service-account
imageCredentials:
  create: true
  registry: "$MASTER_PUBLIC_IP:30003"
  username: "admin"
  password: "Harbor12345"
  secretName: "harbor-registry-secret"
EOF

We can install the chart using the custom values file and a dry run to simulate the installation at the beginning: