Where are helm charts stored locally?

Question

I'm trying to make changes to the values.yaml of a helm chart from a repository. After adding the repository and successfully installing the chart locally, I cannot find it. I realize this question asks the same, but the answer there does not work for me; I ran helm install in my home directory, but the chart is not there.

Answer 1

helm env

Will list all of the paths

HELM_BIN="helm"
HELM_CACHE_HOME="/Users/username/Library/Caches/helm"
HELM_CONFIG_HOME="/Users/username/Library/Preferences/helm"
HELM_DATA_HOME="/Users/username/Library/helm"
HELM_DEBUG="false"
HELM_KUBEAPISERVER=""
HELM_KUBEASGROUPS=""
HELM_KUBEASUSER=""
HELM_KUBECAFILE=""
HELM_KUBECONTEXT=""
HELM_KUBETOKEN=""
HELM_MAX_HISTORY="10"
HELM_NAMESPACE="default"
HELM_PLUGINS="/Users/username/Library/helm/plugins"
HELM_REGISTRY_CONFIG="/Users/username/Library/Preferences/helm/registry.json"
HELM_REPOSITORY_CACHE="/Users/username/Library/Caches/helm/repository"
HELM_REPOSITORY_CONFIG="/Users/username/Library/Preferences/helm/repositories.yaml"

Answer 2

By default, the default directories depend on the Operating System. The defaults are listed below:

Source: Helm Official Documentation Site

Answer 3

Helm is very flexible and allow you to install from the repository and also locally.

What you are trying is to edit a values.yaml from something that is in a remote repository and this is not possible.

What you need to do is to clone the repository to your local storage and than use it locally.

Example:

Lets assume you want to use NGINX Controller that is available in the official Helm Repository.

The official Helm repo URL is https://kubernetes-charts.storage.googleapis.com. This repo is mainteined on GitHub and it's URL is https://github.com/helm/charts.

So the best approach is to clone the official repo github and work on it locally.

$ git clone https://github.com/helm/charts.git

This is going to copy all data from the github repository to your local storage under chart directory.

If you inspect the structure you will find NGINX Ingress under /charts/stable/nginx-ingress and if you list the content of this directory you can find values.yaml.

$ ls -la
total 88
drwxr-xr-x   4 christofoletti christofoletti  4096 Jul 16 08:20 .
drwxr-xr-x 283 christofoletti christofoletti 12288 Jul 16 08:20 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 christofoletti christofoletti   539 Jul 16 08:20 Chart.yaml
drwxr-xr-x   2 christofoletti christofoletti  4096 Jul 16 08:20 ci
-rw-r--r--   1 christofoletti christofoletti   333 Jul 16 08:20 .helmignore
-rw-r--r--   1 christofoletti christofoletti    76 Jul 16 08:20 OWNERS
-rw-r--r--   1 christofoletti christofoletti 31130 Jul 16 08:20 README.md
drwxr-xr-x   3 christofoletti christofoletti  4096 Jul 16 08:20 templates
-rw-r--r--   1 christofoletti christofoletti 16771 Jul 16 08:20 values.yaml

After making all changes you need/want, you can install it using helm as follows from inside charts directory:

user@minikube:~/charts/stable/nginx-ingress$ cd ../../
user@minikube:~/charts$ helm install --name my-release stable/nginx-ingress

So as you can see, you have to identify where are the sources of the repository you are using to e able to clone it.

If you have trouble to identify it, please let me know so I can try to identify.