Helm is a nice package manager for Kubernetes. If you are using k8s specially in complex setups helm can help you in creating a nice release process.

In complex setups sometimes you need a private helm repository for your packages.

This is how you can use a github repo, public or private, as helm repo.

Create a helm chart repo in github

It is easy. Create a repo and for adding packages, follow these commands

$ helm package $YOUR_CHART_PATH/ # to build the tgz file and copy it here

$ helm repo index . # create or update the index.yaml for repo

$ git add .

$ git commit -m 'New chart version'

$ git push

Access your repo

At the moment helm only understand http(s) for repository servers. The following trick shows how you can have that in a private or public github repo without using gh-pages.

You might know that github has a raw view. So simply use the following:



$ helm repo update

$ helm search aerospike

NAME VERSION DESCRIPTION

sample/aerospike 0.1.2 A Helm chart for Aerospike in Kubernetes $ helm repo add sample ' https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kmzfs/helm-repo-in-github/master/' $ helm repo update$ helm search aerospikeNAME VERSION DESCRIPTIONsample/aerospike 0.1.2 A Helm chart for Aerospike in Kubernetes

and if you want to keep your repo private you can create a “Personal access tokens” and use it like:

$ helm repo add sample ' https://MY_PRIVATE_TOKEN@raw.githubusercontent.com/kmzfs/helm-repo-in-github/master/'

Just be careful who is creating the token and what is its level of access.