Helm Quickstart Tutorial: Managing Kubernetes Applications with Helm Charts

This article introduces Helm, the open‑source package manager for Kubernetes, and explains why it is essential for DevOps practitioners who need to manage multiple applications and environments efficiently.

What is Helm? Helm packages applications as charts , which are collections of templated Kubernetes manifests. Charts can declare dependencies (e.g., a MySQL chart) and are versioned, enabling easy upgrades and rollbacks.

Benefits of using Helm include single‑command installation, dependency management, reusable compressed artifacts, release history, configurable deployments across environments, and streamlined CI/CD pipelines.

Problem Helm solves – manually writing YAML manifests leads to hard‑coded values, redundancy, lack of error handling, and no traceability. Helm addresses these issues by templating manifests and managing releases.

Creating a Helm chart from scratch can be done with a single command:

$ helm create nginx

The chart structure contains Chart.yaml , values.yaml , a templates/ directory for Kubernetes resources, templates/NOTES.txt , templates/_helpers.tpl , and optional charts/ and templates/tests directories.

Customizing templates involves editing the files in templates/ and setting values in values.yaml . Example snippet from values.yaml :

# Default values for nginx.
replicaCount: 1
image:
  repository: nginx
  pullPolicy: IfNotPresent
  tag: "1.21.5"
service:
  type: ClusterIP
  port: 80

Installing the chart (with linting and dry‑run for safety):

$ helm lint nginx
$ helm install --debug --dry-run nginx nginx

To perform the actual installation, remove --dry-run :

$ helm install nginx nginx

After installation you can retrieve the application URL using the generated NOTES.txt instructions.

Upgrading a release (e.g., changing the image tag):

$ helm upgrade nginx nginx --set image.tag=1.21.6

Helm records the change in its release history, which can be inspected with helm history or helm diff .

Rollback to a previous revision is straightforward:

$ helm rollback nginx 1

Uninstalling a chart removes all associated resources:

$ helm uninstall nginx

Reusing existing charts from public repositories (e.g., Bitnami) is done by adding the repo, updating the cache, and installing:

$ helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
$ helm repo update
$ helm install my-release bitnami/nginx -f values.yaml

The tutorial concludes with links to the original article and related resources.