Using Helm without Tiller

tillerless.md

Intro

Assume we have some Helm chart we want to deploy, but we don't want to install Tiller on our Kubernetes cluster. This doc will cover how to deploy a helm chart without installing Tiller on the cluster, but will not go into the motivations or tradeoffs of doing so.

Prereqs

1. Helm installed locally
2. Helm initialized (helm init --client-only)
3. kubectl working for your cluster

Steps

1. Add the repo to Helm
   $ helm repo add $repoName $repoUrl
$ helm repo update
2. Download and extract the chart
   $ helm fetch $repoName/$chartName --untar
3. Apply the chart to your cluster using helm template
$ helm template $chartName --name $releaseName --namespace $targetNamespace | kubectl -n $targetNamespace apply -f -
   1. Use --set on the helm command to set value overrides.
   2. Remove the pipe to kubectl and add --notes -x templates/NOTES.txt to view the post-deploy notes.

this is deprecated, thankfully the new version of Helm no longer uses tiller