crossplane-provider-helm

packaged by Chainguard

Chainguard Container for crossplane-provider-helm

This Crossplane provider manages Helm releases on Kubernetes clusters as Crossplane managed resources, so charts can be installed, upgraded, and removed declaratively.

Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.

Download this Container Image

For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/crossplane-provider-helm:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.

Compatibility Notes

The Chainguard crossplane-provider-helm container image is a drop-in replacement for the upstream provider-helm Crossplane package published at xpkg.upbound.io/crossplane-contrib/provider-helm. The image ships the provider binary together with the Crossplane package metadata and CRDs in /package.yaml, so you can reference it directly in a Provider resource. Like the upstream image, it uses /usr/local/bin/provider-helm as the entrypoint, runs as the nonroot user with UID 65532, and sets HELM_CACHE_HOME, HELM_CONFIG_HOME, and HELM_DATA_HOME to directories under /tmp so Helm never writes to the read-only home directory.

Prerequisites

You need a Kubernetes cluster with Crossplane v2.0 or later installed. If Crossplane is not installed yet, install it with Helm:

helm repo add crossplane-stable https://charts.crossplane.io/stable
helm repo update
helm install crossplane --namespace crossplane-system --create-namespace crossplane-stable/crossplane

Getting Started

The provider installs charts with the permissions of its own service account. Create a DeploymentRuntimeConfig that gives the service account a fixed name, a Provider that points at the Chainguard image, and a binding that lets the provider manage resources in the cluster:

cat > provider.yaml <<EOF
apiVersion: pkg.crossplane.io/v1beta1
kind: DeploymentRuntimeConfig
metadata:
  name: provider-helm
spec:
  serviceAccountTemplate:
    metadata:
      name: provider-helm
---
apiVersion: pkg.crossplane.io/v1
kind: Provider
metadata:
  name: provider-helm
spec:
  package: cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/crossplane-provider-helm:latest
  runtimeConfigRef:
    name: provider-helm
---
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
metadata:
  name: provider-helm-cluster-admin
roleRef:
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  kind: ClusterRole
  name: cluster-admin
subjects:
  - kind: ServiceAccount
    name: provider-helm
    namespace: crossplane-system
EOF
kubectl apply -f provider.yaml

Wait for Crossplane to install the provider and report it as healthy:

kubectl wait --for=condition=Healthy provider.pkg.crossplane.io/provider-helm --timeout=300s

Next, create a ProviderConfig that targets the cluster the provider runs in, and a Release that installs the podinfo chart:

cat > release.yaml <<EOF
apiVersion: helm.crossplane.io/v1beta1
kind: ProviderConfig
metadata:
  name: default
spec:
  credentials:
    source: InjectedIdentity
---
apiVersion: helm.crossplane.io/v1beta1
kind: Release
metadata:
  name: podinfo
spec:
  forProvider:
    chart:
      name: podinfo
      repository: https://stefanprodan.github.io/podinfo
    namespace: podinfo
    values:
      replicaCount: 1
EOF
kubectl apply -f release.yaml

Wait for the release to become ready, then confirm that Helm deployed the chart:

kubectl wait --for=condition=Ready release.helm.crossplane.io/podinfo --timeout=300s
kubectl get release.helm.crossplane.io/podinfo -o jsonpath='{.status.atProvider.state}{"
"}'

deployed

Deleting the Release uninstalls the chart:

kubectl delete release.helm.crossplane.io/podinfo

Configuration

The ClusterRoleBinding above grants cluster-admin because the provider can install any chart. In production, bind the provider-helm service account to a role that covers only the resources your charts create, or point the ProviderConfig at a remote cluster with credentials.source: Secret and a kubeconfig stored in a Secret.

Values can come from the Release itself, from individual set entries, or from existing ConfigMaps and Secrets. The following forProvider block pins the chart version, waits for the chart's resources to become ready, and reads the bulk of its values from a ConfigMap so that the Release stays short:

spec:
  forProvider:
    chart:
      name: podinfo
      repository: https://stefanprodan.github.io/podinfo
      version: CHART_VERSION
    namespace: podinfo
    wait: true
    valuesFrom:
      - configMapKeyRef:
          name: podinfo-values
          namespace: podinfo
          key: values.yaml
    set:
      - name: replicaCount
        value: "2"

Replace CHART_VERSION with the chart version you have validated. Entries in set take precedence over valuesFrom, which lets you keep shared defaults in the ConfigMap and override a single value per environment. Pinning version keeps the provider from upgrading the release when a new chart version is published.

Documentation and Resources

• provider-helm on GitHub
• provider-helm examples
• Crossplane providers

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard's free tier of Starter container images are built with Wolfi, our minimal Linux undistro.

All other Chainguard Containers are built with Chainguard OS, Chainguard's minimal Linux operating system designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a more secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Containers include:

• Minimal design, without unnecessary software bloat
• Daily builds to ensure container images are up-to-date with available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs attesting to the provenance of all artifacts within the image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

For cases where you need container images with shells and package managers to build or debug, most Chainguard Containers come paired with a development, or -dev, variant.

In all other cases, including Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest or with a specific version number, the container images include only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they include additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to copy artifacts from the -dev variant into a more minimal production image.

Need additional packages?

To improve security, Chainguard Containers include only essential dependencies. Need more packages? Chainguard customers can use Custom Assembly to add packages, either through the Console, chainctl, or API.

To use Custom Assembly in the Chainguard Console: navigate to the image you'd like to customize in your Organization's list of images, and click on the Customize image button at the top of the page.

Learn More

Refer to our Chainguard Containers documentation on Chainguard Academy. Chainguard also offers VMs and Libraries — contact us for access.

Trademarks

This software listing is packaged by Chainguard. The trademarks set forth in this offering are owned by their respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement by such companies.