Alpha.2: Updates to everything!

This release marks the second of four planned Alpha releases. We have made a lot of progress (and a lot of changes) since Alpha.1. Here are the highlights:

Features:

• helm lint has gotten a major overhaul. The core architecture is now considered stable, and the linter team is transitioning focus to (a) adding rules, and (b) integrating linting into the chart development workflow.
• Helm's server-side Tiller component can now be installed into any namespace. Alpha.1 restricted Tiller to the helm namespace. Now Tiller is installed into the user's configured namespace (usually default) by default, but can be installed into any namespace.
• Values files are now in YAML format (bye-bye TOML). We're experimenting with support for globally scoped variables.
• Templates now support more functions (Sprig 2.3). We still have a few big changes coming to the template system, but the new docs/examples/nginx template provides a better example of how we envision template support.
• helm install can now install directly from a chart repository.
• Helm charts now support .helmignore files, which are similar to .gitignore files, providing a convenient way to tell Helm about files that should not be packaged into the chart.
• Tiller has liveness and readiness probes for Kubernetes

Fixes:

• Documentation has been improved throughout
• The Helm repository has been improved, and the repository index file is now stable
• The pkg/helm and pkg/chartutil packages have been overhauled, and pkg/chart has been removed
• The import path is now k8s.io/helm, thus delaying the onset of carpal tunnel in all Helm contributors
• And many, many more

We are tremendously grateful to the community for a wealth of feedback, use cases, and pull requests.

Looking Ahead

We have some big things coming:

• Support for managing multiple namespaces with one Tiller instance
• The addition of many linting rules
• A few changes to the template language (Warning: some will break backward compatibility with Alpha.2)
• Using ConfigMaps for storage of Tiller data
• The addition of a helm upgrade command that can upgrade a release to a newer chart version!
• And an official charts repository with contribution guidelines and a number of new charts

We're excited to be rapidly iterating on Kubernetes Helm. And while we're all anxious to get Helm stable and released, the team has demonstrated a strong commitment to making this a reliable tool that meets the needs of a growing Kubernetes community.

As always, you are invited to jump into the issue queue, join the Helm slack channel, and also join our weekly Thursday Developer Call.

Alpha 1: A Developer Preview of Helm 2.0.0

This release marks the first in the Helm 2 line. It is an unstable Alpha-quality release that supports the core functionality for the Helm 2 platform.

Helm 2 has two major components:

• The helm client, whose responsibility is to provide tooling for working with charts and uploading them to the server.
• The tiller server, whose responsibility is to manage releases into the Kubernetes cluster.

Additionally, Helm can fetch charts from remote repositories. A Helm 2 chart repository is simply an HTTP server capable of serving YAML and TGZ files.

As a developer preview, the Alpha 1 release does not have a binary build of its components. The quickest route to get started is to fetch the source, and then do a make bootstrap build. To start using Helm, use helm init.

To keep up with news on Helm, join the #Helm channel on the Kubernetes Slack channel, or join our weekly Thursday developer sync.

Minor revision of 1.2 release for project maintainers

This revision of the 1.2 release fixes a bug that causes make to fail when building and pushing the docker images for the dm server side components. The binaries for this release are pushed to gcr.io/dm-k8s-prod with tag v1.2.1 and to gcr.io/get-dm.