Helm Dependencies
External
Internal
Overview
Revised for Helm 3
All applications, maybe with the exception of the most trivial, usually depend on other runtime components, such as web servers, caches, databases, etc. Helm provides a mechanisms to formally specify, manage and deploy these dependencies as part of a release. A Helm chart may declared dependencies, which are other Helm charts published in external repositories, conveniently packaged by people who presumably know the respective components well.
To Deplete
How Helm Dependencies Work
During the installation or upgrade process, the Helm client looks into the ./charts sub-directory of the chart being installed, and installs/upgrades the charts whose chart archives are found in that subdirectory. The content of the charts/ subdirectory is the one and only source of truth on dependencies to be installed or upgraded. If a dependency chart is not present in the charts/ subdirectory at the time of installation/upgrade, it is not installed/upgraded. All charts present in the charts/ subdirectory at the time of installation/upgraded are installed/upgraded.
The "dependencies" element of Chart.yaml is a convenience feature that allows specifying the dependency list in a synthetic manner, by "coordinates": name, version and repository URL. However, listing the dependency coordinates in Chart.yaml is not sufficient, additional manual steps need to be performed: helm dependency update, which is a step that downloads dependencies in charts/ based on their Chart.yaml "dependencies" specifications.
Helm does not automatically handle transitive dependencies, in the same manner as Maven, for example, does: it is not possible to specify that chart "a" depends on chart "b", only specify the chart "b" "coordinates" (name, version and repository URL) and expect Helm to automatically pull "b" during the installation process. In this situation. Maven would contact the dependency's repository and pull the artifact. If that artifact had its own dependencies, specified by coordinates, Maven would recursively pull those as well, contacting as many repositories as necessary. This is known as what Maven friends refer to as "downloading the Internet".
Helm behaves differently. It expects instead a chart to embed all dependencies it needs, recursively. This decision was probably taken because the chart metadata is really small, especially when compressed. and the chart transitive dependency graphs are not large, so embedding the whole graph in an archive is feasible, which would not be in Maven's case. Indeed, for a situation where an "a" chart depends on a "b" chart, and the "b" chart depends on a "c" chart, the structure of the "a"'s chart archive is;
a
├── Chart.yaml
├── charts
│ └── b
│ ├── Chart.yaml
│ ├── charts
│ │ └── c
│ │ ├── Chart.yaml
│ │ ├── templates
│ │ │ └── pod.yaml
│ │ └── values.yaml
│ ├── templates
│ │ └── pod.yaml
│ └── values.yaml
├── templates
│ └── pod.yaml
└── values.yaml
The enforcement of presence of dependencies happens when the chart is packaged with helm package command. If a chart is packaged manually, and its dependencies are omitted while building the chart archive, the chart archive cannot be installed. An attempt to install a chart archive that does not embed dependencies produces:
Error: found in Chart.yaml, but missing in charts/ directory: some-dependency-chart
For more details on how to package a chart with its dependencies, see:
Subcharts
The charts stored in the "charts/" subdirectory are also known as "subcharts".
Dependency Declaration
Dependencies are declared in Chart.yaml 'dependencies' section.
...
dependencies:
- name: # The name of the dependency
version: # The version of the dependency
repository: # Repository URL
...
Example:
...
# 'a' Chart.yaml
dependencies:
- name: b
version: 1.0.0
repository: http://helm-example.com/charts
...
Note that simply declaring the dependency in Chart.yaml is not sufficient. The dependency needs to be physically downloaded and placed in the charts/ subdirectory with:
helm dependency update
Aliases
Each element of the "dependencies" list allows for an optional "alias" attribute.
Packaging and Dependencies
Dependencies and Values
Dependency configuration values should be specified in the top chart values.yaml, and should be prefixed with the dependency name. It is recommended to only override values in the top level chart, and not in any subchart.
TODO:
- Example