Installing Helm

Helm is the Kubernetes package manager. It doesn't come with Kubernetes, so you have to install it. Helm has two components: a server-side component called tiller, and a CLI called helm.

Let's install helm locally first, using Homebrew:

$ brew install kubernetes-helm

Then, properly initialize both the server and client type:

$ helm init
$HELM_HOME has been configured at /Users/gigi.sayfan/.helm.

Tiller (the Helm server-side component) has been installed into your Kubernetes Cluster.

Please note: by default, Tiller is deployed with an insecure 'allow unauthenticated users' policy.
To prevent this, run `helm init` with the --tiller-tls-verify flag.
For more information on securing your installation see: https://docs.helm.sh/using_helm/#securing-your-helm-installation
Happy Helming!

With Helm in place, you can easily install all kinds of goodies in your Kubernetes cluster. There are currently 275 chars (the Helm term for a package) in the stable chart repository:

$ helm search | wc -l
275

For example, check out all the releases tagged with the db type:

$ helm search db
NAME                               CHART VERSION  APP VERSION    DESCRIPTION
stable/cockroachdb                 2.0.6          2.1.1          CockroachDB is a scalable, survivable, strongly-consisten...
stable/hlf-couchdb                 1.0.5          0.4.9          CouchDB instance for Hyperledger Fabric (these charts are...
stable/influxdb                    1.0.0          1.7            Scalable datastore for metrics, events, and real-time ana...
stable/kubedb                      0.1.3          0.8.0-beta.2   DEPRECATED KubeDB by AppsCode - Making running production...
stable/mariadb                     5.2.3          10.1.37        Fast, reliable, scalable, and easy to use open-source rel...
stable/mongodb                     4.9.1          4.0.3          NoSQL document-oriented database that stores JSON-like do...
stable/mongodb-replicaset          3.8.0          3.6            NoSQL document-oriented database that stores JSON-like do...
stable/percona-xtradb-cluster      0.6.0          5.7.19         free, fully compatible, enhanced, open source drop-in rep...
stable/prometheus-couchdb-exporter 0.1.0          1.0            A Helm chart to export the metrics from couchdb in Promet...
stable/rethinkdb                   0.2.0          0.1.0          The open-source database for the realtime web
jenkins-x/cb-app-slack             0.0.1                         A Slack App for CloudBees Core
stable/kapacitor                   1.1.0          1.5.1          InfluxDB's native data processing engine. It can process ...
stable/lamp                        0.1.5          5.7            Modular and transparent LAMP stack chart supporting PHP-F...
stable/postgresql                  2.7.6          10.6.0         Chart for PostgreSQL, an object-relational database manag...
stable/phpmyadmin                  2.0.0          4.8.3          phpMyAdmin is an mysql administration frontend
stable/unifi                       0.2.1          5.9.29         Ubiquiti Network's Unifi Controller

We will use Helm a lot throughout the book.