Understanding Helm Templates

One of the fundamental features of Helm is to create and maintain the Kubernetes resources that comprise an application. Helm accomplishes this with a concept called templates. Templates represent the core component comprising Helm charts, as they are used to configure Kubernetes resources based on a given set of values.

In Chapter 4, Scaffolding a New Helm Chart, you scaffolded a new Helm chart by using the helm create command, which created basic templates under the chart’s templates/ folder. In this chapter, we will dive deep into the world of Helm templates, and at the end, we will revisit the scaffolded templates to make improvements and deploy the Guestbook frontend. By the end of the chapter, your Helm chart will be able to deploy the full Guestbook architecture—from the Redis backend added in Chapter 5, Helm Dependency Management, to the frontend that we will add later in this chapter.

Here are the main topics for this chapter...