Tests

Helm tests are a useful validation mechanism for Helm Releases, and thus are supported by the Helm Operator.

Enabling tests

When tests for a HelmRelease are enabled, the Helm Operator will run them after any successful installation or upgrade attempt. In the case of a test failure, the prior installation or upgrade will be treated as failed, resulting in the release being purged or rolled back if enabled.

Tests can be enabled by setting .test.enable:

spec:
  test:
    enable: true

Wait interaction

When tests are enabled, resource waiting defaults to true since this is likely needed for test pre-conditions to be satisfied.

Uninstall or rollback release on test failure

The spec.test.ignoreFailures allows the HelmRelease to be left in a released state if the tests fail. Setting ignoreFailures to false will automatically uninstall or rollback the HelmRelease if any of the tests fail. If the tests are ignored, the Released condition will be left as true and Tested will be false.

spec:
  test:
    enable: true
    ignoreFailures: false

Test timeout

Test timeout can be set via the .test.timeout option.

spec:
  test:
    enable: true
    timeout: 600

It is defined as the time to wait for any individual Kubernetes operation during tests in seconds. Defaults to 300 when omitted.

Helm 2 vs 3

In Helm 3, test-specific funcationality was removed in favor of a generic test hook no different than any other hook. The Helm Operator takes this into account as detailed below.

Test cleanup

Helm 3 removed the helm test --cleanup flag in favor of hook delete policies. For HelmReleases targeting Helm 2, test cleanup is enabled by default since upgrades are highly likely to cause test pod name conflicts without it. This flag currently deletes test pods immediately after they are run, but the only guarantee is that tests are cleaned up before running a subsequent test for the same HelmRelease, as delaying the deletion would allow time to debug failures, and thus may be implemented in the future. Test cleanup can be disabled by setting .test.cleanup to false.

spec:
  helmVersion: v2
  test:
    enable: true
    cleanup: false

Test parallelism

Helm 2 supported helm test --parallel --max 10 to run tests in parallel. Helm 3 will likely expand this functionality to all hooks. Once the Helm 3 implementation is available this can be integrated into the Helm Operator, and translated into the equivalent Helm 2 options for test parallelism as well.