TRG 6.01 - Released Helm Chart

Status	Created	Post-History
Active	01-Dec-2022	Initial release

Description

A released Helm chart for each Tractus-X sub-product is expected to be available in corresponding GitHub repository.

Why

Tractus-X components can only be used and bundled with other components of Tractus-X if there is a version of the component with reliable content. This can only be achieved by creating a release of your Helm chart. We recommend to use GitHub Chart Releaser Action.

Process description

If you follow this recommendation to use GitHub Chart Releaser Action to provide a released Helm Chart for your Tractus-X sub-product, the process will provide the following for you:

1. A GiHub Release is created with
   • a GitHub release, named Chartname-Semver (e.g. productABC-0.1.1)
   • a Git tag Chartname-Semver
   • a release asset, containing the Helm chart files
2. A local Helm repository is created (file index.yaml in branch gh-pages)

info

Only if you follow this TRG to release a Helm Chart, the released Helm chart will be automatically added to the central Tractus-X Helm repository.

Prerequisites

To get the GitHub Chart Releaser Action working, the following prerequisites must be met:

• A branch named gh-pages in your repository

• Change the GitHub Pages source branch to gh-pages in your repository settings. Submit request via Otterdog, ensure following are set:

    gh_pages_build_type:"legacy",
    gh_pages_source_branch:"gh-pages",
    gh_pages_source_path:"/",

• Helm charts must be located in folder /charts

• A GitHub Actions Workflow (see section Implementaion)

Implementation

Create a GitHub Workflow file with following content:

name: Release - Helm Charts

on:
  push:
    paths:
      - 'charts/**'
    branches:
      - main
jobs:
  release:
    # depending on default permission settings for your org (contents being read-only or read-write for workloads), you will have to add permissions
    # see: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/security-guides/automatic-token-authentication#modifying-the-permissions-for-the-github_token
    permissions:
      contents: write
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      # fetch-depth: 0 is required to determine differences in chart(s)
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0

      - name: Configure Git
        run: |
          git config user.name "$GITHUB_ACTOR"
          git config user.email "$GITHUB_ACTOR@users.noreply.github.com"

      - name: Install Helm
        uses: azure/setup-helm@v3
        with:
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

      - name: Run chart-releaser
        uses: helm/chart-releaser-action@v1.4.1
        env:
          CR_TOKEN: "${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}"

Each time a changed Helm Chart is pushed (e.g. merge a PR) to main branch, the workflow will be triggered.

Don'ts

caution

• Changing the appVersion requires also changing the version in Chart.yaml
• Chart version itself can be increased without changing the appVersion

If the appVersion is increased, also the version in Chart.yaml must be increased, otherwise the workflow will fail:

The Helm chart name and version is used for creating the Git Tag. As the Helm chart version did not increase, the workflow tries to create a Git tag which already exists.