Managing Helm repositories

Internal Helm repositories are used to store Helm packages or charts.

Adding a Helm repository

Add a repository.

Required user type or access level: Cluster administrator

  1. From the navigation menu, click Manage > Helm Repositories. Default repositories are available.
  2. Click Add Repository.

  3. Enter the repository details.

    • Name: Enter a unique repository name.
    • URL: Enter the GitHub repository URL for your index.yaml file. You can connect to both http and https repositories. To connect to the Helm Kubernetes chart repository, enter https://kubernetes-charts.storage.googleapis.com/.
    • Source URL: GitHub URL for your charts. This field is not required.

  4. Click Add. You can find your charts in the Catalog.

Synching Helm repositories

Sync your internal Helm repository with an identical Helm repository that is hosted externally.

Note: You must manually synchronize your Helm repositories to ensure that the list of charts is current.

Required user type or access level: Cluster administrator

  1. From the navigation menu, click Manage > Helm Repositories. Default repositories are available.
  2. Click Sync repositories. If new charts are downloaded from the external repositories, you can find the new charts in the Catalog.

Backing up Helm repositories

Back up a Helm repository

  1. On the boot node, go to the /var/lib/icp/helmrepo directory.
  2. Make a copy of the charts that are in that directory. The chart files are compressed files and end in .tgz or tar.gz.

Restore the contents of a Helm repository

  1. Make sure that helm-repo is running and that this directory exists: /var/lib/icp/helmrepo.
  2. Move the charts that you backed up to the /var/lib/icp/helmrepo directory.
  3. Remove the helm-repo deployment pod, and then the index.yaml repopulates with the charts that are located in the PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC).

Deleting a Helm repository

Remove a repository connection.

The names of the default repositories ibm-charts and local-charts are reserved. If you delete these default repositories, you cannot add them back by using these reserved names. To restore the default repositories, you must use the same URL but provide a different name from the reserved ones.

Required user type or access level: Cluster administrator

  1. From the navigation menu, click Manage > Helm Repositories.
  2. In the same row as the repository to remove, select Action > Delete.
  3. Click Delete.