Is this even possible with helm?
What options for security are possible (BasicAuth? Client Certs? OAuth2?)
Is there any example / documentation about this (both server and client side)?
Helm Private Repository using private GitHub repositories.
Steps:
Create a private GitHub repository named private-helm-registry or any.
Place your Raw Helm Charts.
Create a charts folder and place index.yaml and packaged charts in .tgz format inside this folder.
Create a GitHub Personal Access Token with read-only access.
Add your Repository to helm using the following command:
$ helm repo add helm-registry 'https://<git_hub_personal_access_token>#raw.githubusercontent.com/myGitHubAccountName/private-helm-registry/master/charts/'
"helm-registry" has been added to your repositories
Note:
1. Enclose the Url with single quotes ' '.
2. The trailing / is mandatory.
To add development or other branches as helm repository, use branch name:
$ helm repo add helm-registry-dev 'https://<git_hub_personal_access_token>#raw.githubusercontent.com/myGitHubAccountName/private-helm-registry/<branch>/charts/'
"helm-registry-dev" has been added to your repositories
Explore more at: Using a private github repo as helm chart repo.
If you want a private helm repository, there are not many options today, at least to my knowledge.
Use internal network where you deploy your repository, so it will be not accessible from the outer world.
Use helm plugins or write your own.
So basically there are no built-in helm private repositories, but you can achieve required functionality with helm plugins.
Plugin examples:
GitHub - it is for using GitHub Pages as a chart repository. Not a private repo, but it shows an idea of a plugin, it is very small and simple.
Keybase - similar to GitHub plugin, but stores charts in Keybase instead. Still not private, but can be modified to use keybase /private directories.
App Registry - uses app registry (quay.io) to store charts.
AWS S3 - provides a way to use Amazon S3 as a private repo for helm charts. I am the author of this plugin, I wrote it because all options above were not suitable for my purposes.
Azure Blob Stoage - This blog post contains a way to use Azure Blob storage as a private repo for helm charts
I assume you mean a Helm Repo rather than securing the docker images.
My understanding is that it's just a basic webserver
You could just use GCS or S3 and set up the IAM rules to secure them?
Related
I have a helm chart and I want to add it to my gitlab repository. But when I run:
helm repo add repo_name url
I am getting the following error:
Error: looks like "https://gitlab.<domain>.com/group/infra/repo/helm/charts/" is not a valid chart repository or cannot be reached: error converting YAML to JSON: yaml: line 3: mapping values are not allowed in this context
Linter shows it is a valid chart.
Here is index.yaml:
apiVersion: v1
entries:
helloworld:
- apiVersion: v2
appVersion: 1.0.0
created: "2021-06-28T14:05:53.974207+01:00"
description: This Helm chart will be used to create hello world
digest: f290432f0280fe3f66b126c28a0bb21263d64fd8f73a16808ac2070b874619e7
name: helloworld
type: application
urls:
- https://gitlab.<domain>.com/group/infra/repo/helm/charts/helloworld-0.1.0.tgz
version: 0.1.0
generated: "2021-06-28T14:05:53.973549+01:00"
Not sure what is missing here.
It looks like you want to use the helm chart that is hosted on the gitlab. Unfortunately, it won't work as you want it to. As Lei Yang mentioned well in the comment:
helm repo and git repo are different things.
In the official documentation of Helm, you can find The Chart Repository Guide.
You can find it also a guide how to create a chart repository:
A chart repository is an HTTP server that houses an index.yaml file and optionally some packaged charts. When you're ready to share your charts, the preferred way to do so is by uploading them to a chart repository.
Here you can find section, how to properly host chart repos. There are several ways to do this - for example you can use a Google Cloud Storage (GCS) bucket, Amazon S3 bucket, GitHub Pages, or even create your own web server.
You can also use the ChartMuseum server to host a chart repository from a local file system.
ChartMuseum is an open-source Helm Chart Repository server written in Go (Golang), with support for cloud storage backends, including Google Cloud Storage, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, Alibaba Cloud OSS Storage, Openstack Object Storage, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage, Baidu Cloud BOS Storage, Tencent Cloud Object Storage, DigitalOcean Spaces, Minio, and etcd.
Alternatively it could be also possible to host helm charts in JFrog.
You can host your own Public Helm repository on git.I have done it on Github and the process is very easy and straightforward.
You can follow this link
https://medium.com/#mattiaperi/create-a-public-helm-chart-repository-with-github-pages-49b180dbb417
You will have to package the chart and create an index.yaml file.You will also have to host your repository branch as Github pages.
I am not sure if gitlab also supports this but worth a shot.
I have an existing github project. I want to create/add a helm folder to the project to store the helm yaml files. I want to reference this github project/folder to act like a helm repo in my local/dev environment. I know I can add the charts to my local/default helm repo. The use case is if another developer checks out the code in github and he needs to work on the charts then he can run helm install directly from the working folder. The helm.sh website has instructions of adding a gh-pages branch but I am wondering if I can avoid it.
Can I use an existing github project and it via the helm repo add command?
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a way to publish helm charts via GitHub using private repositories. On a theoretical level, it might work using GitHub token and 2nd (raw URLs method), but I haven't tried it. Since you're using docker registry anyway, it might be worth trying using OCI (docker) registry to store the charts.
If that doesn't work, or you have public repos, it is possible to either use GitHub Pages, or use GitHub raw URLs. Both of the solutions require public repository.
To use GitHub pages:
Setup github pages to publish docs folder as github pages (you can use a different name, just substitue later)
Package the helm repo as .tgz (using helm package): helm package charts/mychart -d docs/. Substitute charts/mychart with a path to a chart root folder
Include an index.yaml -- an index file for the repository helm repo index ./docs --url https://<YOUR_ORG_OR_USERNAME>.github.io/<REPO_NAME>
Now you can add the repo: helm repo add <INTERNAL_NAME> https://<YOUR_ORG_OR_USERNAME>.github.io/<REPO_NAME>
To use Raw URLs:
Place index.yaml and chart TGZs into a folder called docs, just like above
Now you can add a repo: helm repo add <INTERNAL_NAME> https://raw.githubusercontent.com/<YOUR_ORG_OR_USERNAME>/<REPO_NAME>/<BRANCH_USUALLY_MASTER>/docs
Firstly make sure that you have have fully functional helm repository. The tricky part is to access it as if it was simple HTTP server hosting raw files. Fortunately Github provides such feature using raw.githubusercontent.com. In order for helm to be able to pull files from such repository you need to provide it with Github username and token (Personal Access Token):
> helm repo add - username <your_github_username> - password <your_github_token> my-github-helm-repo 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/my_organization/my-github-helm-repo/master/'
> helm repo update
> helm repo list
NAME URL
stable https://kubernetes-charts.storage.googleapis.com
local http://127.0.0.1:8879/charts
my-github-helmrepo https://raw.githubusercontent.com/my_organization/my-github-helm-repo/master/
> helm search my-app
NAME CHART VERSION APP VERSION DESCRIPTION
my-github-helmrepo/my-app-chart 0.1.0 1.0 A Helm chart for Kubernetes
These are steps for adding new packages to existing repository
If you want to add new package to existing repository simply:
1. Place new package in your local repository root
2. Execute: helm repo index .. This will detect new file/folder and make updates.
3. Commit and push your new package
4. Finally execute command: helm repo update
Security ascpect
It is important to realize where does helm actually store your Github token. It is stored as plain text in ~/.helm/repository/repositories.yaml. In this case it will be good to generate token with as few permissions as possible.
Take a look here: hosting helm private repository.
In case of Rancher the Private Catalogs get added and the private catalogs are also displayed but the helm charts associated to a private catalog can't be accessed. If I select a catalog I don't find the templates files listed.
In case if we put the same helm chart on a public catalog the templates file get listed. The issue so clearly is with Rancher and not with the helm charts.
I tried to put the helm charts on different private repository like ACR and git private repo and the issue still persists so also the issue with the registry is ruled out.
Steps to reproduce:
1) Create a Private App Catalog (any, but I used ACR)
2) Add the app catalog to Rancher by providing the correct Credentials.
3) Go and Launch the app
4) The helm chart(pushed in prev steps) gets listed.
5) Try to go and Launch the App.
Result:
You find that there is no template files listed (Values.yml,Deployment.yml etc are not listed )
Logs of Rancher Server
[ERROR] Failed to load chart: Error fetching helm URLs: [Error in HTTP
GET of [_blobs/.tgz], error: Get //user:*#_blobs/**-0.1.0.tgz:
unsupported protocol scheme ""]
I get a unsupported Protocol schema error when the chart tries to read the index.yml and then ries to get the *.tar.gz file
The issue seems to be linked to other issues like : https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/15671
We need to use Rancher Charts for charts to be correctly listed in the app catalog of Rancher.
Rancher Chart and Helm chart have some differences which are listed here : https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.x/en/catalog/custom/creating/
There are two ways to use charts in Rancher:
Helm chart way that requires the GIT server responding to GET request ( charts are stored as tar.gz file along with index.yml file).
Rancher chart way where the charts are stored as normal files ( store the whole helm chart folder as it is , no need to gunzip it as in helm chart way) on GIT server.
In my case i had the tar.gz file that had the helm chart and index.yml file that renders the chart. This way is supported by Rancher only if there is some external server responding to the GET request which finds the chart from the index.yaml. Github pages support this feature that is why I was able to use the helm chart in Rancher.
Solution : I unzipped the tar and directly uploaded folder on GIT and use this GIT repo in Rancher to get the chart correctly listed under app catalog.
Do remember to use .git at the end of the url defined in the app catalog.
I want to use Artifactory as private Helm repository and deploy my app using helm chart to Kubernetes everytime a new version of helm chart gets uploaded to Artifactory.
Yes, you can do it. You can find more information about it here
The Helm charts repo is a web server that serves files, it could also be something like Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage bucket and then you can add an index.yaml file and then all your charts. So you could also integrate that with Spinnaker.
I want to maintain a few Helm charts in the same repository that refer to each other in their respective requirements.yaml files. How should these charts refer to each other's relative paths?
For local development I can use the file:// protocol as in
name: chart-name
repository: file://../chart-name
However when I move to a hosted repository I will need to change this. I would prefer that this directory of charts does not need to have its final location baked into its repository.yaml files. Is this possible?
When you move to a hosted repository, won't you have had to publish each chart?
If so, as long as you don't have cyclic dependencies, publish each chart in dependent order to your hosted repo and then update requirements.yaml.
i.e. if you have 3 charts A,B and C.
A has no dependency on B nor C
B depends on A
C depends on B
Publish A to the hosted repo, update B's requirements to point to the hosted repo name of A, then publish B and repeat the update process for C.
I'm doing something similar but I don't use a hosted repo. I already have a large Ansible setup so I wrote a role which installs charts directly from directories. There's a single git repo with all (currently 7) my charts and this minus running a helm server is a similar process. The obvious downside being the manual update of requirements, but I'm not sure there's any other choice on that.
EDIT
A bit hacky but could work:
To avoid editing dependencies one way is to also run your chart repo locally.
If your repo is available at charts.domain.com, add a dependency to this as per usual
dependencies:
- name: my-chart
repository: http://charts.domain.com
version: 0.0.1
then, when you develop locally, add an entry to your hosts file which points charts.domain.com to your localhost charts.
Sample workflow might be something like:
mkdir my-charts
mv my-char-a-0.0.1.tgz my-charts/
helm repo index my-charts/ --url http://charts.domain.com
Now serve the index/repo generated from localhost. This way your dependency is always to charts.domain.com
Depending on which remote host you're using you could just rsync this local index to your remote when you're happy to release and that way you reduce the chance of your local and remotes diverging.
Again, caveat being you need to enable disable this host entry depending on if your developing or wanting to use the live repo.
You can always script the editing of host file entry.