Define Helmfile

In this lesson, we’ll be installing the Kanban application using Helmfile. As the base Helm chart, we’ll be using the generic app chart from one of the previous lessons.

The key feature of Helmfile is that the entire configuration for all Helm releases is located in a single place. This place is the helmfile.yaml file. It’s a typical YAML file in which we declare all the parts needed to deploy an application on a cluster. Most of the time, we’ll write which Helm releases we’d like to have, but apart from that, we can specify different configurations for each environment or Helm repositories where the charts are located.

And this is what we’ll do first: Add a link to the Helm repository where the app chart is located. With Helm CLI we need to run a separate command to add a repository reference, knowing its URL. With Helmfile, we still need to know its URL, but this time we put it in the file, so the first step will not be needed anymore.