Helm Chart Editor

I didn't like to edit Helm Charts because to understand how my YAML template file looks rendered wasn't really obvious. I thought a split-view editor which has on the left side the template and on the right side the rendered template would help me much when I work with helm charts.

There are some similar projects like:

• helm-playground.com, github.com/shipmight/helm-playground
• or github.com/paulvollmer/helm-playground

But they had some limitations like:

• they both have the need to copy and paste the template into the editor instead of loading the chart / template from the local directory,
• they both are using a own implementation of a helm template/chart renderer written in go (compiled to a WebAssembly) which isn't exactly the same what helm does.

Demonstration

Setup

Shell, edit-chart command

The idea behind the edit-chart command is to quickly start editing a chart from the command line. the edit-chart command (script) changes the volume mount source in the docker-compose file and restarts the container to apply the changes.

curl -sSLf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tobiashochguertel/helm-editor-frontend/main/install.sh | bash

Usage:

cd path-to-my-chart && edit-chart && open http://localhost:4173

Docker-Compose

See docker-compose.yml for how to setup and configure this project.

Example: docker-compose.yml

version: '3.5'
services:
  backend:
    image: docker.io/tobiashochguertel/th-helm-playground-backend:latest
    volumes:
      - ./../gitlab-project:/app/public
      # - /Users/tobiashochgurtel/work-dev/helm-playground/github/gitlab/charts/gitlab:/app/public
    environment:
      - PORT=3001
  template:
    image: docker.io/tobiashochguertel/th-helm-playground-template:latest
    environment:
      - PORT=3002
  webapp:
    image: docker.io/tobiashochguertel/th-helm-playground-frontend:latest
    ports:
      - '4173:80'
    environment:
      - BACKEND_PORT=3001
      - BACKEND_HOSTNAME=backend
      - BACKEND_TEMPLATE_HOSTNAME=template
      - BACKEND_TEMPLATE_PORT=3002

to provide a chart to the Helm Chart Playground, use the volume mount option of docker / podman. Above we mount a path ./../gitlab-project into the backend container to path /app/public.

Example for ./../gitlab-project:

❯ cd ./../gitlab-project
❯ tree
.
├── Chart.yaml
├── README.md
├── charts
├── templates
│   ├── NOTES.txt
│   ├── _helpers.tpl
│   ├── _ingress-annotations.yaml
│   ├── cronjob.yaml
│   ├── db-initialize-job.yaml
│   ├── db-migrate-hook.yaml
│   ├── deployment.yaml
│   ├── hpa.yaml
│   ├── http-ingress-route.yaml
│   ├── https-ingress-route.yaml
│   ├── ingress.yaml
│   ├── network-policy.yaml
│   ├── pdb.yaml
│   ├── postgres-instance.yaml
│   ├── pvc.yaml
│   ├── redirect.yaml
│   ├── service-account.yaml
│   ├── service.yaml
│   └── worker-deployment.yaml
└── values.yaml

3 directories, 22 files

Each change of a file in the editor is automatically written back to the file in the mounted directory, there is now Save button or similar. Also no function in the editor to create a new file. If you want to add a new file, then please use the shell or Filesystem Browser, and refresh the editor with F5 to see the new file in the editor's file and directory list on the left side.

Related Repositories

• th-helm-playground-backend - Provides the Files and content for the frontend (~left side).
• th-helm-playground-template - Renderer, returns the content for the right side of the editor.