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A Practical Guide to Helm

Build a Helm Umbrella Chart

Explore how to build a Helm umbrella chart that bundles the Kanban frontend, backend, and database services. Learn to refactor sub-charts, manage dependencies, and structure values.yaml to deploy and test complex Kubernetes applications effectively.

We'll cover the following...

We’ll be building an umbrella chart for the entire Kanban stack, including the front-end and back-end Service, and the database.

The first step is to create two separate charts—kanban-frontend and kanban-backend. Therefore, copy and paste the entire /app folder and rename it accordingly.

Refactor sub-charts

The kanban-frontend chart

Let’s start with correcting the kanban-frontend chart. We’ll first adjust our Chart.yaml file:

YAML
apiVersion: v2
name: kanban-frontend
description: A Helm chart for kanban-frontend
type: application
version: 0.1.0
appVersion: "1.16.0"

We’ve renamed a chart, changed a description, and removed the dependencies property because we don’t need to have a database for a front-end Service.

Next, we’ll move on to the /kanban-frontend/templates/deployment.yaml file, for which we don’t need to inject environment variables; therefore, we can remove that part. So the resultant Deployment file would be as follows:

YAML
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: {{ include "fullName" . }}
  labels: {{ include "labels" . | nindent 4 }}
spec:
  replicas: {{ .Values.replicaCount }}
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: {{ include "fullName" . }}
  template:
    metadata:
      labels: {{ include "labels" . | nindent 8 }}
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: {{ include "fullName" . }}
          {{- with .Values.container }}
          image: {{ .image }}  
          ports:
            - containerPort: {{ .port }}
          {{- end }}

Another thing that we might spot is that all the values are not under the app property from a ...