Basic Helm Dependency Clarification

Question

To ease local development/testing, I have an umbrella chart that deploys all my sub-charts. Those applications make use of resources (e.g. MongoDB, Kafka, etc) and I want to make sure that if you are installing the umbrella chart to a cluster, it will also install those resources.

To do this, I have the following:

apiVersion: v2
name: my-cool-project
type: application
version: 0.1.0
appVersion: 0.1.0
dependencies:
  - name: my-cool-app-1
    repository: "file://my-cool-app-1"
  - name: my-cool-app-2
    repository: "file://my-cool-app-2"
  - name: bitnami/kafka
    version: 2.5.0
    repository: "https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami"

Unfortunately, installing this chart throws the following error:

Error: found in Chart.yaml, but missing in charts/ directory: bitnami/kafka

This seems so fundamental to the concept of Helm that the fact it's not working means I'm clearly missing something basic. Even the official docs are pretty clear this is the right approach.

Most documentation/guides instruct you to simply helm install it straight to the cluster. While this might solve my immediate problem of needing Kafka or MongoDB on the cluster, my desire is to code-ify the need for that resource so that I can achieve "single chart installs everything to an empty cluster and it just works" status.

What am I missing?

Run helm dependency update and retry – Tarun Khosla Jul 26 '20 at 20:43 — Tarun Khosla, Jul 26 '20 at 20:43

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 27 '20 at 02:50

This worked for me :

apiVersion: v2
name: my-cool-project
type: application
version: 0.1.0
appVersion: 0.1.0
dependencies:
  - name: my-cool-app-1
    repository: "file://my-cool-app-1"
  - name: my-cool-app-2
    repository: "file://my-cool-app-2"
  - name: kafka 
    version: 11.6.0 
    repository: "https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami"

Then update on the dependencies on your local helm Chart:

○ → helm dependency update
Hang tight while we grab the latest from your chart repositories...
...Successfully got an update from the "bitnami" chart repository
Update Complete. ⎈Happy Helming!⎈
Saving 1 charts
Downloading kafka from repo https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
Deleting outdated charts

✌️☮️

Perfect, thanks! I have a much better understanding of the chart/app versions and where they are used now with that example — Tyler Murry, Jul 27 '20 at 12:48

Basic Helm Dependency Clarification

1 Answers1