Storing Helm in Docker Registries

We can apparently now store helm charts in Docker registries - this was made available via helm commands since v3.8.0. https://helm.sh/docs/topics/registries/

Now with that being available for use, we can now use it across a variety of storage mechanism (as compared in the past when the artifacts produced through it has to be managed in some of file system and would require some of index file to list all available helm charts available).

To try things out locally, let’s try setting up a simple Docker registry on our host machine:

docker run -d -p 5000:5000 --restart always --name registry registry:2

We can then try to push a golang image into it

docker pull golang
docker tag golang:latest localhost:5000/golang:latest
docker push localhost:5000/golang:latest

Building helm chart and pushing it in

First things first is to ensure that our helm version is valid and has the capability to do the following task of pushing helm charts into oci registries

helm version
# Output:
# version.BuildInfo{Version:"v3.10.1", GitCommit:"9f88ccb6aee40b9a0535fcc7efea6055e1ef72c9", GitTreeState:"clean", GoVersion:"go1.18.7"}

Next step is to build up a helm chart. Here is an example of one:
https://github.com/hairizuanbinnoorazman/Go_Programming/tree/master/Web/basicHelm

Within this folder, run the following command to package it:

helm package ./basic-app/

This command would create the basic-app-0.1.0.tgz file which we can then push the registry

helm push basic-app-0.1.0.tgz oci://localhost:5000/basic-app
Pushed: localhost:5000/basic-app/basic-app:0.1.0
Digest: sha256:6d3557ff6044f490d535e0cda7bbf979c7879a1380af6cf6a1dc9d8b532d5134

With that, we now have a proper place to put our helm artifacts - they can all be centralized in container based registries (since it supports the oci standard). We no longer need to consider putting it in alternative storage locations e.g. a simple filesystem or even blob storage.

More details of this is available on the following documentation page:
https://helm.sh/docs/topics/registries/