Helm - Installation and Configuration

In this blog, we will see how to install and configure Helm on your machine.

Generically speaking, to work with Helm, you should have the following:

• A functional Kubernetes cluster
• kubectl installed and configured on your local computer
• Login details set up in the Kubeconfig file, located in your user’s home directory, in the folder .kube/config. On Windows, if your username would be john, this file should be located in C:\Users\john\.kube.config. On Linux-based operating systems, it would be located in /home/john/.kube/config.

There are a few install methods listed on https://helm.sh/docs/intro/install/. The easiest is to just navigate to this page and download the latest release for your operating system.

In the next section, you'll learn how to install Helm on Windows OS and Linux OS.

Want to learn more about Helm’s basic concepts and features? Check out this video.

Install Helm on Windows

For example, if your OS is Windows, at the time of writing, the latest Helm version could be found in this package: https://get.helm.sh/helm-v3.5.4-windows-amd64.zip

There’s nothing to actually install on your system, as Helm consists of a single, simple executable file. So you just have to open up the downloaded ZIP archive and highlight the “helm” executable file.

Right click and select “Copy” after which, navigate to your user’s home directory, found at C:\Users\your_username. Now paste the file at this location.

Now you can open up Command Prompt and you should be able to execute helm commands. Simple as that!

You should periodically check the page that lists newly releases of Helm and verify if a new version is available. If there is one, just follow the same steps and overwrite the helm file you extracted at C:\Users\your_username\helm.

Installing on Linux

Since Linux already has package managers available, it’s easier to install through those, as it also automatically tracks when new versions of the software tool can be downloaded.

If you’re on an Ubuntu distribution, this simple command will install Helm the easiest:

sudo snap install helm --classic

We used the “–classic” parameter here as this package uses what is called “classic confinement” which is a more “relaxed” sandbox that gives the app a bit more access to the host system, rather than strictly isolating it to its separate environment. This way, Helm can easily access the Kubeconfig file in our home directory, so it knows how to connect to our Kubernetes cluster.

On Debian or Debian-based distros that don’t have the Snap preinstalled, you can use the following commands:

curl https://baltocdn.com/helm/signing.asc | sudo apt-key add -


sudo apt install apt-transport-https


echo "deb https://baltocdn.com/helm/stable/debian/ all main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/helm-stable-debian.list


sudo apt update && sudo apt install helm

And just in case this won’t work in the future (for example, because the baltocdn.com repository is not available anymore) you can use the following script.

First, download the script

curl -fsSL -o get_helm.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/master/scripts/get-helm-3

Make it executable

chmod +x get_helm.sh

And run it to install Helm.

./get_helm.sh

Checkout the Helm for the Absolute Beginners course here

Checkout the Complete Kubernetes learning path here