Central helm charts repository for grafana?

[torstenwalter]

As the helm/charts repository is being deprecated many charts are moving to new location.

For example all Prometheus related charts are being moved to prometheus-community GitHub organisation.

At https://github.com/scottrigby/prometheus-helm-charts you find the current state of that migration. That repository hosts multiple helm charts, CI pipeline is set up using GitHub actions e.g. kind to spin up a Kubernetes cluster, chart-testing to verify helm charts and super-linter to check the syntax.

While doing that migration the discussion came up wat to do with dependent charts which are still in stable repository. See prometheus-community/helm-charts#30 and prometheus-community/helm-charts#1 (comment)

In the meantime @zanhsieh started migrating stable/grafana to https://github.com/grafana GitHub Org.

The goal would be to to have a similar setup to Prometheus or Jenkins.
Charts index.ysml is provided via GitHub Pages which even allows to use custom domains like https://charts.jenkins.io/. The chart packages (tgz) are normal GitHub releases. Check https://github.com/scottrigby/prometheus-helm-charts/releases for an example.

Now my question: Would you be interested in hosting the loki charts together with grafana chart in a similar way?

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[slim-bean]

What you describe is already how the Loki helm charts are setup, but under the Loki repo:

https://grafana.github.io/loki/charts/

Back when setting up the Loki charts we decided not to use the helm/charts repo because even then it was being deprecated.

The chart sources are kept in the Loki repo and we publish them to a gh-pages branch which is what you see behind that URL I pasted above.

I don't think we would want to move the helm charts to a different repo I think that would be confusing to Loki users who wish to make changes to the charts, it would also make our maintenance burden higher as we would need to monitor multiple git repos for changes to the charts.

[monotek]

I think the question is not to move the charts to some third party but to have loki & grafana in the same repo, managed by grafana staff.

[slim-bean]

Understood, however I'm not sure that represents a significant advantage?

I'm not totally opposed to this but currently it's the Loki maintainers who are responsible for managing all the Helm PR's moving this to a separate repo means we have to now monitor another repo, which will also have a lot of non Loki PR's in it.

Perhaps I'm being a bit selfish here but the maintenance burden for Helm charts is already really high, adding another step for us feels undesirable until we get to a point where we have more dedicated team members managing Helm for both Grafana and Loki although I'm not sure this will ever be the case.

I also personally feel like while Loki and Grafana are maintained by Grafana Labs, they are separate projects and combining them really only seems to add the single benefit of one helm repo add command instead of two? (Not sure if there are other benefits I'm overlooking).

Given that other charts, you mention prometheus, are moving to separate repos I think the norm is always gonna look like:

• helm repo add prometheus...
• helm repo add grafana...
• helm repo add loki...

It almost feels more intuitive to me to keep them separate, but again maybe I'm just biased here from the maintenance side of things :)

[monotek]

Single repo would mean you could share the same ci pipeline without the need to develop and maintain it twice.

I also think users expect to find all of the Grafana tools in the same repo.

If Grafana staff is not able to maintain all the Helm charts alone, you might want to have a community supported repo too? I've made already several contributions to the Grafana chart. The dashboard import feature is also coming from the company i work for, so i would be happy to help in a Grafana community repo under the Grafana umbrella too :)

[scottrigby]

@slim-bean It's entirely up to org/project/chart maintainer preference 😄 Helm itself doesn't dictate any of this. That said Helm repos are intended to support multiple charts, and the helm tools for CI and CD (including the wrapping Helm GitHub Actions to help make this easier for chart maintainers) supports this as well. But it/s not required. Some app maintainers prefer to keep the chart coupled with the application codebase (especially in cases where chart manifests are auto-generated by app source changes, such as CRD updates), while some prefer logical grouping of charts together in a standalone git repo. So really up to you.

FWIW, I can see an advantage to end users in having all Grafana related charts in the same helm repo. Mainly so chart PRs, testing, and release schedule etc are all consistent. It may also be a help to you to have additional community maintainers for the charts, and as @monotek said to expand the grafana helm community with newly proposed charts. Control can be managed with GitHub CODEOWNERS (this is what other repos such as prometheus did, where there are 17 different charts with different contributors). Other that that, I'm not sure what the advantages are. The repo is there now, so you can always change your mind at any point in the future.

@monotek You can still offer to contribute that to https://github.com/grafana/helm-charts even if the Loki maintainers prefer the loki chart to remain separate.

[slim-bean]

Single repo would mean you could share the same ci pipeline without the need to develop and maintain it twice.

FWIW, I can see an advantage to end users in having all Grafana related charts in the same helm repo. Mainly so chart PRs, testing, and release schedule etc are all consistent.

This is extremely compelling.

It may also be a help to you to have additional community maintainers for the charts

As is this.

You have both put me firmly on the fence now :) I really appreciate the discussion!

Let me regroup with some folks internally between Grafana and other Loki maintainers to see if we can get a rough consensus on what we'd like to do with the Loki charts.

Thanks again for your patience and discussion, more to come! (but probably later next week I'm off for a few days)

[torstenwalter]

Thank you for considering it. It's great to hear pros and cons in this discussion.

Enjoy your days off.

[unguiculus]

@slim-bean I would also be in favor of hosting charts for all Grafana products in one repo. I would like to offer helping as a collaborator. I'm currently developing a Helm chart for Loki in microservices mode and would be happy to contribute that or to update the existing chart. I'm a Helm org and charts maintainer, am familiar with Helm best practices, and developed much of the CI tooling and GitHub actions now used in the new charts repo for the Grafana chart.

[scottrigby]

Count me in as well, if that would be helpful.

[unguiculus]

Linking #2529

[unguiculus]

@slim-bean Have you had a chance to discuss this internally?

Here's what I'm currently working on:
https://github.com/unguiculus/loki-helm-chart

I'd appreciate feedback and would be happy to work on upstreaming the chart.

[owen-d]

Wow, this is a great issue. Apologies that we haven't gotten around to discussing this much internally and ❤️ for all the volunteering. Sharing the CI/Release burden between charts of different projects does seem really attractive.

[torstenwalter]

Wow, this is a great issue. Apologies that we haven't gotten around to discussing this much internally and ❤️ for all the volunteering. Sharing the CI/Release burden between charts of different projects does seem really attractive.

There are enough volunteers to make this happen ;-)
If you want this it should not be hard to find someone doing the migration.