Friday, March 13, 2020

Migration of Bitnami's Helm Charts from Stable Repository to Bitnami's Repository Now Complete


The Helm 3 release has resulted in some important changes that affect chart deployment and chart repositories. These changes have been implemented to facilitate chart maintenance. Keep reading to learn more about the major changes planned for the Helm and Bitnami chart repositories.

What is going to change in Helm charts repositories?

In the next few months, the stable and incubator repositories will be de-listed from all Hubs. They are already excluded in Helm 3 by default. To use these repositories, it is necessary to explicitly add them using the “helm repo add” command. For more information about how the Helm community will use a distributed approach to maintain chart repositories going forward, refer to this proposal.

What does the new distributed approach mean?

Chart maintainers should move the charts they maintain to their own repository, and of course, offer support to users, include them in the Kubeapps Hub, etc.

Given the stable repository deprecation timeline, the Bitnami team has already migrated its contributed charts to the Bitnami charts GitHub repository.

This repository is already included in the Kubeapps Hub and we will provide the same cadence in updates and user support as we have done for the stable repository during the last years.

How to use the Bitnami charts repository

The installation instructions are very similar to the older ones. The main change is that you must first add the bitnami repository to your local Helm installation with the “helm repo add” command and use this repository when installing a specific chart:

$ helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami


$ helm install my-release bitnami/<chart> # Helm 3


$ helm install --name my-release bitnami/<chart> # Helm 2



How to contribute to the Bitnami charts repository?

Going forward, any new issues or pull requests (PRs) related to Bitnami’s charts should be created in the Bitnami GitHub repository. Likewise, we will redirect to that repository all the Issues and PRs that were created in the stable repository before the date of the transition.

We are open to accepting new chart contributions in the Bitnami repository. Such charts will be integrated into our release pipeline, which implies that they will benefit from automatic updates for container images, daily testing, CVE scanning, etc. If you want to submit a new chart, don’t hesitate to create a new PR!

We will also be happy to answer your questions about this change! Post them to this issue thread opened in the stable repository. This thread also has information about the reasons for this transition and how to follow up on the process.