KubeApps – Discover and launch Kubernetes-ready apps using Helm | Hacker News Reader

KubeApps – Discover and launch Kubernetes-ready apps using Helm

kubeapps.com

69 pointsprydonius11 comments

I personally would find it useful if helm would provide way of saving the template to yaml. E.g. only install helm "locally", but when deploying to prod just use plain yaml files based on config created via helm.

Why I would want it:

- Easier to do minor tweaks on top of the helm config, if variables exported by helm do not support it

- I find it elegant that all state required to restore state of the cluster are in yaml files. Helm require installation of apps for each cluster

- IIUC if app installed via helm changes between I install it on local cluster and prod cluster I may end up with different versions of the app

I know I can do "kubectl get pod/my-pod -o yaml". Firstly, I would have to figure our which variables are permanent (state variable like "nodeName" are mixed with permanent variables like "restartPolicy"). Secondly, I would also have to figure out all k8s objects that were created by helm.

This is an interesting use-case, one way you might be able to achieve this is using technosophos' template plugin[1] which will allow you to skip the trip to the cluster and render templates client-side.

[1] https://github.com/technosophos/helm-template

Looks like what I was looking for. Only minor nit is that I can't set --name like in helm install, but I can easily just search and replace in the yaml file.

I'm really excited to see projects like make containerized applications more available. There's a lot of awesome new projects in this space and I'm hoping that we as a community can come together and adopt a standard API for compatibility across all tools. CNR[0] is the name of the effort that is essentially extending OCI[1] to support apps (Helm, KPM, Kubernetes, Docker Compose, Docker DAB).

[0]: https://github.com/cn-app-registry/

[1]: https://github.com/opencontainers/image-spec

https://cloudron.io/store/index.html is another app registry but meant for prepacked instant deploy apps (and not infra like nginx). I have been pushing them to use kubernetes or swarm to scale their offering.

For those who are not familiar with Helm is basically apt-get for Kubernetes apps

I tried this out last night on my cluster (https://github.com/helm/monocular)

While nice looking I was hoping it provided a way to easily install and configure the variables from the ui.

Thanks for the feedback, it's something we've been discussing about putting on the roadmap. If you have any more thoughts on how this could work, we'd love to hear your thoughts in the issue queue https://github.com/helm/monocular/issues.

I'd love to see a bit more of monocular without having to install it. Do you know if there are any screenshots, blog posts or even a demo instance?

Yes! KubeApps.com is a running public instance of Monocular that indexes the official Kubernetes charts repositories (https://github.com/kubernetes/charts).