Use github pages to host your helm charts

Leveraging the official helm chart repository is a great way of publishing and sharing your helm charts with the world, however this comes with a price.

Changes to your chart will have to be approved and merged by someone else, which in my experience can take a long time…

For those case when you need autonomy and fast releasing you better host your own chart repository, essentially all you need is an object storage. There is many out there Google Cloud Storage, Amazon S3, Azure blob storage, Digital Ocean Spaces … Most of them would be covered by their free tier so at the end of the month this would be for free.

However they may require you to open accounts adding your credit card even if the bill will be zero, and be harder to use, so why not use github pages to do so?

It has decent usage limits for “small” to “medium” size projects.

How to do it?

1. Create a repository

⚠ avoid using charts as the name, this will collide with other repos such as the official one and you won’t be able to fork it anymore!

1. Setup GitHub Pages pointing to the /docs folder.

In your newly created repository go to Settings > Github Pages > Source and select Master branch /docs folder

From there, you can create and publish charts by pushing the helm package of a chart to the /docs directory, you could keep the source code in the root of the repository as well, follows an example.

$ helm package kwatchman/
$ mv kwatchman-0.1.0.tgz docs/
$ helm repo index docs --url https://snebel29.github.io/snl-charts
$ git add --all
$ git commit -m "Adding kwatchman"
$ git push origin master

Adding this repository on helm

To make it available for your helm installation, you have to add the repository locally.

$ helm repo add snl-charts https://snebel29.github.io/snl-charts

You can find the full working example of my own repository snl-chart