Tillerless helm2 install

Page content

It looks like it is not so hard to have Tillerless Helm. So let me go to more details.

Parts of the Kubernetes series

Since Helm v2, helm got a server part called The Tiller Server which is interacts with the helm client, and the Kubernetes API server. By default helm init installs a Tiller deployment to Kubernetes clusters and communicates via gRPC.

Example image

The community voted that Helm v3 should be Tillerless. If we can run tiller localli we can achieve the same goal.

Example image

There is a helm plugin for this same purpose.

$ helm plugin install https://github.com/rimusz/helm-tiller
Installed plugin: tiller

Use this plugin locally

helm tiller start

It will start the tiller locally and kube-system namespace will be used to store helm releases but you can change the name of the namespace if you want:

helm tiller start my-team-namespace

# stop tiller
helm tiller stop

How to use this plugin in CI/CD pipelines

helm tiller start-ci
export HELM_HOST=localhost:44134

Then your helm will know where to connect to Tiller and you do not need to make any changes in your CI pipelines.