explaingit

helm/charts

★ 15,417GoAudience · ops devopsComplexity · 1/5Setup · hard

TLDR

An archived, no-longer-maintained collection of official Helm charts for Kubernetes that was sunset in November 2020, kept as a frozen historical reference, all new chart work should use Artifact Hub instead.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((helm-charts))
    What it is
      Archived repo
      Helm chart library
      Frozen since 2020
    History
      Stable collection
      Incubator collection
      Deprecated Nov 2020
    Modern replacement
      Artifact Hub
      Distributed repos
    Use today
      Historical reference
      Chart templates
    Audience
      Kubernetes operators
      DevOps engineers
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Code map

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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Read old Helm chart definitions as structural templates when writing a new chart from scratch for a similar application.

USE CASE 2

Review how a specific application was packaged for Kubernetes as of 2020 for historical or migration reference.

Tech stack

GoHelmKubernetes

Getting it running

Difficulty · hard Time to first run · 1day+

Repository is archived and unsupported since November 2020, use Artifact Hub for current, maintained Helm charts.

In plain English

This repository is the old, now-archived home of the official "stable" and "incubator" Helm chart collections for Kubernetes. The description and the README both flag it as obsolete. Helm is a packaging system for Kubernetes, the container orchestration platform, a Helm chart bundles up the configuration files needed to install a piece of software on a cluster in one command. This project used to be where the community shared and maintained those bundles for common applications. The README explains that the project went into a one-year maintenance mode starting in November 2019, when Helm 3 was released. From that date no new charts were accepted, only patches. In August 2020 the repositories were de-listed from the Helm Hub, and on 13 November 2020 support formally ended. The git repository itself remains as a frozen archive. The canonical place to find Helm charts today is Artifact Hub, an aggregator that lists distributed chart repositories. The old stable and incubator repos can still technically be added to a local Helm client with the commands shown in the README, helm repo add stable and helm repo add incubator pointing at charts.helm.sh, but they are no longer maintained. You would only land here for historical reference, to read an old chart as a template for one you are writing yourself, or if some legacy automation still pulls from the stable URL. For any new work the README directs you to the current Helm docs and to Artifact Hub. The repository itself contains Go tooling and the chart sources organised into stable and incubator folders.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
I need to write a Helm chart for a Node.js app. Show me how to use the archived stable/node chart from helm/charts as a starting template and adapt it for Kubernetes 1.28.
Prompt 2
My CI pipeline still references helm repo add stable pointing at charts.helm.sh. What is the modern replacement on Artifact Hub and how do I migrate my Helm dependencies?
Prompt 3
Using the archived helm/charts stable folder as a reference, explain the structure of a production-ready Helm chart and what each file does.
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