Chart-updater

Chart-updater is a Flux companion that allows for automatic Helm chart updates. It monitors Helm chart repository for new chart versions. If new version is found, related HelmRelease manifest is updated in the git config repository.

This may be useful for deploying charts of your components, especially if the code and chart template of the component share the same repository and life-cycle.

Flux itself is able to update K8s clusters when new images are pushed to the container repository, but charts must be updated manually. There are plans to extend Flux to support automatic chart updates, see the reported issue. Until implemented, this tool may be useful to keep your charts up-to-date.

Chart-updater may also update Docker images, so that Charts and images are updated atomically in a single commit.

How to use in K8s cluster

The tool is available as a Helm chart, ready to be deployed into your Kubernetes cluster.

helm repo add rossumai https://rossumai.github.io/helm-charts
helm install chart-updater rossumai/chart-updater

See charts/chart-updater for a complete list of available configuration options.

Auto-update annotations

Similar to Flux, annotations are used to mark Helm charts that should be updated. The only supported manifest type is HelmRelease.

• rossum.ai/chart-auto-update -- Switches-on chart auto-update.
• rossum.ai/chart-version -- Specifies which Chart versions should be used for auto-update. May be semver, glob or regex pattern.
• rossum.ai/update-image.chart-image -- Switches-on update of main chart image
• rossum.ai/update-image.<NAME> -- Switches-on update of a named image

In case image is updated, new tag is obtained from Chart's appVersion.

Example of HelmRelease with glob-base chart auto-updates:

apiVersion: helm.fluxcd.io/v1
kind: HelmRelease
metadata:
  name: hello-world
  namespace: default
  annotations:
    rossum.ai/chart-auto-update: "true"
    rossum.ai/chart-version: glob:1.0.*
    # rossum.ai/chart-version: semver:1.0.x
    # rossum.ai/chart-version: regex:^1\.0\..*
spec:
  chart:
    repository: https://helm.lol
    name: hello-world
    version: 4.1.0
  values:
    image:
      repository: some.docker.repo/hello-world
      tag: v0.6.1

Example of image auto-update:

apiVersion: helm.fluxcd.io/v1
kind: HelmRelease
metadata:
  name: hello-world
  namespace: default
  annotations:
    rossum.ai/chart-auto-update: "true"
    rossum.ai/chart-version: glob:1.0.*
    rossum.ai/update-image.chart-image: "true"
spec:
  chart:
    repository: https://helm.lol
    name: hello-world
    version: 4.1.0
  values:
    image:
      repository: some.docker.repo/hello-world
      tag: v0.6.1

Running locally

If you want to test the tool, you can use public Docker images available at Dockerhub.

docker run rossumai/chart-updater --help

Install

If you want to install and run chart-updater locally, follow these steps:

• make sure you have Python 3.8+ installed
• install dependencies: pip install -r requirements.txt

Run

Run ./chart-updater.py --help to obtain list of available options:

Usage: chart-updater.py [OPTIONS]

Options:
  --git-url TEXT            Git config repo URL.  [required]
  --git-branch TEXT         Git config repo ref.  [default: master]
  --git-path TEXT           Git config path.  [default: .]
  --git-user TEXT           Git commit author's name.  [default: Chart Sync]
  --git-email TEXT          Git commit author's email.  [default: chart-
                            sync@rossum.ai]
  --git-timeout INTEGER     Git operations timeout (seconds).  [default: 30]
  --git-ssh-identity TEXT   Git config SSH identity file (key).
  --helm-repo-url TEXT      Helm repo URL.  [required]
  --sync-interval INTEGER   Period of git sync (seconds).  [default: 60]
  --annotation-prefix TEXT  Prefix of k8s annotations.  [default: rossum.ai]
  --help                    Show this message and exit.