A Practical Guide to Helm/

...

/

Install a Custom Helm Chart

Install a Custom Helm Chart

Learn how to configure and install a custom Helm chart.

We'll cover the following...

Configure front-end and back-end services

To make use of the Helm chart that has been just built we need to provide some values, e.g., a Docker image name and a tag. So, let’s define YAML files for the frontend and backend.

First, let’s do it for a front-end application by creating a separate /kanban-frontend.yaml file, as follows:

Press + to interact
app:
  name: kanban-frontend
  group: frontend
  container:
    image: wkrzywiec/kanban-ui:helm-course
    port: 80

As we can see, we’re keeping an initial structure of properties from values.yaml and overriding only those values that are needed, like the most important one—Docker image— which is wkrzywiec/kanban-ui.

For a back-end application we need an analogous thing, so we create a /kanban-backend.yaml file, as below:

Press + to interact
app:
  name: kanban-backend
  group: backend
  container:
    image: wkrzywiec/kanban-app:helm-course
    env: 
      - key: DB_SERVER
        value: postgres
      - key: POSTGRES_DB
        value: kanban
      - key: POSTGRES_USER
        value: kanban
      - key: POSTGRES_PASSWORD
        value: kanban

This is very similar, but this time we also want to inject environment variables that are necessary for back-end applications to make a connection with a PostgreSQL database.

Having both files defined we can now move on to the next step, which is installing both Helm releases.

Install and verify a custom Helm chart

To run a back-end service of a Kanban application, first we would need to have a Postgres database in which we can store data about boards and a list of tasks. We can either try to find cheap hosting for that or manually install it locally, but luckily for us, we know Helm and we know that ...