Do not install Helm, use it within a Docker container
I am not a fan of installing software for the following reasons:
- Once you have software on your computer, you need to have a software update policy;
- The more software you have on your computer, the harder it is to reproduce behaviour from one machine to another;
- If you install software for each tutorial you read, you end up with a bunch of dead software on your computer, taking up resources and space.
For these reasons, I prefer using the Docker approach and running everything I need within a Docker container. Let’s run Helm without installing it:
docker run -e KUBECONFIG="$KUBECONFIGONDOCKER" -ti --rm -v $(pwd):/apps -v ~/.kube:/root/.kube -v ~/.helm:/root/.helm -v ~/.config/helm:/root/.config/helm -v ~/.cache/helm:/root/.cache/helm alpine/helm
Remember, earlier, when we set the KUBECONFIGONDOCKER environment variable in our .zshenv file? Now we can see it in use: because we’re sharing ~/.kube on our local machine with /root/.kube on our helm container, KUBECONFIG would not work on the container. Hence, KUBECONFIGONDOCKER.
You should see some output from the Helm tool, as if you had installed helm locally and typed helm.
(In this case we are running helm within a local Docker container based on its community-supported image. We are sharing our required local directories with the container, and making sure the container has access to the same KUBECONFIG environment variable as we have locally.)
To avoid typing this in every time we need helm, we can add the following alias to ~/.zshenv:
alias helm='docker run -e KUBECONFIG="$KUBECONFIGONDOCKER" -ti --rm -v $(pwd):/apps -v ~/.kube:/root/.kube -v ~/.config/helm:/root/.config/helm -v ~/.cache/helm:/root/.cache/helm -v ~/.helm:/root/.helm alpine/helm'
source ~/.zshenv
helm version
# version.BuildInfo{Version:"v3.1.1", GitCommit:"afe70585407b420d0097d07b21c47dc511525ac8", GitTreeState:"clean", GoVersion:"go1.13.8"}
Your version may differ, but make sure it’s 3 or above.