What’s New in Helm v3.5? Key Features, OCI Support, and New Commands

Helm v3.5 Official Release

Helm v3.5 is a feature release focusing on OCI support and new template functions. The most notable changes include:

More than 20 new template functions added (see Sprig v3.2.0 for the full list).

Experimental OCI support via the HELM_EXPERIMENTAL_OCI environment variable and helm pull oci:// command.

New --skip-refresh flag for helm dep build to avoid refreshing the local cache.

Added wait-for-jobs flag that works with --wait so helm install waits for all Jobs to finish, respecting the --timeout limit.

Introduced --kube-cafile flag and HELM_KUBECAFILE environment variable to specify a CA file for Kubernetes connections, solving “x509: certificate signed by unknown authority” errors. Example usage:

KUBECONFIG=~/.mycustomkubeconfig
kubectl config set-cluster internal.company --server=https://internal.company:443 --certificate-authority=/tmp/ca.crt
kubectl config set-context some-context --cluster=internal.company --namespace=myns
kubectl config use-context some-context
HELM_NAMESPACE=myns HELM_KUBEAPISERVER=https://internal.company:443 helm install --kubeconfig "${KUBECONFIG}" some-app company/some-app

HELM_NAMESPACE=myns HELM_KUBEAPISERVER=https://internal.company:443 HELM_KUBECAFILE=/tmp/ca.crt helm install some-app company/some-app

Helm Hub has been replaced by Artifact Hub (see related article). For a complete list of changes, refer to the official release notes on GitHub.