Helm Plug-Ins

What are plug-ins?

Up till now, we’ve learned a ton of Helm CLI commands that help us install applications or build them. We also found out about the actions that can take care of a chart’s quality. In short, Helm is a very powerful tool that allows us to do many complicated things. But what if we need more functionality?

Luckily, Helm creators predicted this for us. If there is no built-in command in Helm that we want to use, we can install a plug-in. Helm allows us to install any extension which complies with its API. It can be found on the Internet or we can create our own. Once it’s installed, we can use it as an integral part of the Helm CLI.

In this lesson, we’ll install and learn how to use a very popular extension, the Helm Diff plug-in. But before that, let’s learn how to find more of them.

The most natural answer would be to start with Artifact Hub. When we go to its advanced search, on the left panel there is a category “Kind” under which we can find the “Helm plugins” option. Once selected, we’ll get a full list of plug-ins available for us to install, as shown below:

Apart from Artifact Hub, we can find plug-ins in different places. Usually, they will be located on GitHub or can be searched on Google. We’ve also included a curated list of recommended extensions at the end of this lesson.

Install the Helm Diff plug-in

Note: A sandbox for this lesson is located at the end.

From the multiple plug-ins that are available, we’ve ...