Testing in a live cluster

Understanding how to perform tests in a live Kubernetes cluster is an essential part of developing and maintaining a Helm chart. Live testing helps ensure your chart is functioning as intended and can be used to help prevent regressions as new additions are introduced to your chart over time.

Testing can involve, but is not limited to, the following two different constructs:

• Readiness probes and the helm install --wait command
• Test hooks and the helm test command

A readiness probe is a type of health check in Kubernetes that, upon success, marks a pod as Ready and makes the pod eligible to receive ingress traffic. An example of a readiness probe is located at chapter9/guestbook/templates/deployment.yaml:

readinessProbe:
  httpGet:
    path: /
    port: http

This readiness probe will mark the pod as Ready when an HTTP GET request succeeds against the / path.

Readiness probes can...