Helm Chart Repository
Cloudsmith provides public & private repositories for Helm Charts

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes that allows development and operations teams to easily manage and deploy these increasingly complex cloud native applications to their Kubernetes clusters. Helm allows you to manage applications on your Kubernetes cluster in much the same way as you’d manage applications on your Linux server with apt
or yum
.
Helm works by packaging up a set of YAML definitions along with the necessary configuration to quickly stand up all components of an application in a repeatable way. A single chart can be as simple or complex as necessary, deploying anything from a single container to a full distributed application. Helm combines these application definitions with user-provided configuration to allow simple overriding of configuration where needed, allowing users to concentrate on shipping software and not on the nitty-gritty of configuring every application they need to run.
Helm packages are known as “Charts” and are stored in a “Chart Repository”. By default, Helm comes bundled with the “stable” chart repository, hosted for free by Google. Most public charts are hosted here, mostly provided by vendors packaging their own software for use by others.
For more information on Helm, please see:
- Helm: The official website for Helm
- Helm Hub: The official public repository for Helm Charts
- Helm Documentation: Helm Documentation
- Kubernetes Documentation: Kubernetes Documentation
In the following examples:
Identifier | Description |
---|---|
OWNER | Your Cloudsmith account name or organisation name (namespace) |
REPOSITORY | Your Cloudsmith Repository name (also called "slug") |
TOKEN | Your Cloudsmith Entitlement Token (see Entitlements for more details) |
USERNAME | Your Cloudsmith username |
PASSWORD | Your Cloudsmith password |
API-KEY | Your Cloudsmith API Key |
NAME | A name for your repository in your helm configuration |
CHART_NAME | The name of your chart |
CHART_VERSION | The version number of your chart |
Upload a Chart
To upload, you will need to generate your chart first. You can do this with the helm CLI:
helm package .
This generates a chart package file (.tgz) like CHART_NAME-CHART_VERSION.tgz
that you can upload.
Please see the official Chart development guide for more information on building your own Charts for distribution.
Upload via the Cloudsmith CLI
For full details of how to install and setup the Cloudsmith CLI, see Command Line Interface.
The command to upload a Helm chart via the Cloudsmith CLI is:
cloudsmith push helm OWNER/REPOSITORY CHART_NAME-CHART_VERSION.tgz
Example:
cloudsmith push helm org/repo your-chart-1.0.0.tgz
Upload via Cloudsmith Website
Please see Upload a Package for details of how to upload via the Website UI.
Example Project
For examples of what your project should look like for packaging and publishing/uploading, please have a look at our examples repository (on GitHub). We'll supplement these with more detailed guidance later but otherwise, just ask! - we're here to help.
Download / Install a Chart
Setup
Assuming you have helm already installed, it is straight-forward to add a Cloudsmith-based chart repository. You use the helm repo add
and helm repo update
commands as follows:
Public Repositories
helm repo add NAME \
'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/OWNER/REPOSITORY/helm/charts/'
helm repo update
Private Repositories
Private Cloudsmith repositories require authentication. You can choose between two types of authentication, Entitlement Token Authentication or HTTP Basic Authentication.
The setup method will differ depending on what authentication type you choose to use.
Entitlement Tokens, User Credentials and API-Keys should be treated as secrets, and you should ensure that you do not commit them in configurations files along with source code or expose them in any logs
helm repo add NAME \
'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/TOKEN/OWNER/REPOSITORY/helm/charts/'
helm repo update
helm repo add NAME \
'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/basic/OWNER/REPOSITORY/helm/charts/' \
--username USERNAME \
--password PASSWORD
helm repo update
helm repo add NAME \
'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/basic/OWNER/REPOSITORY/helm/charts/' \
--username USERNAME \
--password API-KEY
helm repo update
helm repo add NAME \
'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/basic/OWNER/REPOSITORY/helm/charts/' \
--username token \
--password TOKEN
helm repo update
Installing a Chart
To install/use a specific version of a chart:
helm install NAME/CHART_NAME --version CHART_VERSION
To install the latest version of a chart:
helm install NAME/CHART_NAME
Or you can upgrade to the most recent version of a chart if you've already installed:
helm upgrade NAME/CHART_NAME
If you've got a requirements.yaml
file in your chart, you can specify this as a dependency:
dependencies:
- name: CHART_NAME
version: CHART_VERSION
repository: NAME
Removing Setup
Helm provides a very clean method of removing a chart repository, simply run the following command:
helm repo remove NAME
Current Limitations
The Cloudsmith Helm Chart repository implementation currently has the following limitations:
- Provenance files are not yet supported.
Note: The Helm v3 API is generally supported (please check with support for edge-cases)
Upstream Proxying / Caching
Not Supported
Key Signing Support
GPG
Troubleshooting
Please see the Troubleshooting page for further help and information.
Updated 10 months ago