Charts Repo Actions Demo

Example project to demo testing and hosting a chart repository with GitHub Pages and Actions.

Actions

• @helm/kind-action
• @helm/chart-testing-action
• @helm/chart-releaser-action

Project Status

master supports Helm 3 only, i. e. both v1 and v2 API version charts are installable.

Chart Sources

• charts/example-v1: Sample chart with API version v1
• charts/example-v2: Sample chart with API version v2
• charts/dependencies-v1: Simple chart with API version v1 to test dependencies from an external Charts repo
• charts/dependencies-v2: Simple chart with API version v2 to test dependencies from an external Charts repo

How-To

You can automatically test and host your own chart repository with GitHub Pages and Actions by following these steps.

Prerequisites

• A GitHub project to use for your Charts repo (a clean project is most straightforward, as there won't be release cluttering or possible gh-pages conflicts)
• A branch to use for GitHub Pages (gh-pages is most straightforward, as it's the default and requires no configuration)
• A project Secret named CR_TOKEN with the value of a GitHub personal access token
  • The token must have repo scope
  • The token's user must have write access to the project
  • To mitigate risk you may wish to limit the token to a single project by creating a machine user
  • Please note the personal access token is required because of an Actions bug, and will hopefully be unnecessary in the future

Steps

The above prerequisites must be complete before the steps below, or your charts' initial versions won't be released.

1. Use the master branch for all of the below, if you wish to use the Actions workflow files as-is
2. Copy the .github/workflows files from this project to yours
3. Add your charts to a parent directory in the project (/charts is most straightforward, as it's the default. To change this see helm/chart-testing > configuration > chart-dirs)
4. Optional: To list your charts repo publicly on the Helm Hub, see Helm Hub > How To Add Your Helm Charts

Results

• The Lint and Test Charts workflow uses @helm/kind-action GitHub Action to spin up a kind Kubernetes cluster, and @helm/chart-testing-action to lint and test your charts on every Pull Request and push
• The Release Charts workflow uses @helm/chart-releaser-action to turn your GitHub project into a self-hosted Helm chart repo. It does this – during every push to master – by checking each chart in your project, and whenever there's a new chart version, creates a corresponding GitHub release named for the chart version, adds Helm chart artifacts to the release, and creates or updates an index.yaml file with metadata about those releases, which is then hosted on GitHub Pages
• You should now be able to add your charts repo with helm repo add <owner> https://<owner>.github.io/<project>