First Steps Using Helm

Now that we’ve got a basic understanding of what Helm is and our development environment up and running we’ll be using Helm to build a small project. Let’s go over the description in this lesson.

In this part of the chapter we’ll learn how to use Helm to install charts that were prepared by other developers.

Helm has a big, thriving community of developers who create and maintain a huge number of Helm charts that are available for free. They can be found on Artifact Hub.

What will be built

In this course, we’ll be installing a couple of Helm charts. Usually, it will result in more than one Kubernetes objects being created or updated. We will get confirmation from Helm that a chart has been installed, but there will be no detailed information about all the Kubernetes objects that have been installed.

To check them we would need to use the kubectl command-line tool or one of the tools like the VS Code extension for Kubernetes.

But this is not very convenient. Sure, those non-kubectl tools can be very handy, but they have to be installed and configured on local machines. Some organizations prefer to not allow their employees to have these tools, usually due to security reasons. An alternative would be to create a website with a dashboard to which the company’s administrators can grant access.

One of the most popular Kubernetes online dashboards is the one that is officially supported, the Kubernetes Dashboard. Here are some sample screenshots of it: