Values

Now that we have a good understanding of where we can get our charts from and what they have to offer, it is time to examine how you can supply values to be used with the chart when the Helm Operator makes a release.

Inlined values

The most simple option to define the values for your Helm release. This is a YAML map as you would put in a file and supply to Helm with -f values.yaml, but inlined into the HelmRelease manifest. For example:

spec:
  values:
    foo: value1
    bar:
    baz: value2
    oof:
    - item1
    - item2

Values from sources

It is possible to define a list of config maps, secrets (in the same namespace as the HelmRelease by default, or in a configured namespace) or external sources (URLs) from which to take values. For charts from a Git repository, there is an additional option available to refer to a file in the chart folder.

The values are merged in the order given, with later values overwriting earlier. These values always have a lower priority than the values inlined in the HelmRelease via the spec.values parameter.

This is useful if you want to have defaults such as the region, clustername, environment, a local docker registry URL, etc., or if you simply do not want the values to be visible as plaintext in the HelmRelease.

Config maps

The reference to a config map is defined by adding a configMapKeyRef to the spec.valuesFrom list.

spec:
  valuesFrom:
  - configMapKeyRef:
      name: default-values
      namespace: my-ns
      key: values.yaml
      optional: false

The definition of the listed keys is as follows:

• name: The name of the config map.
• namespace (Optional): The namespace the config map is in. Defaults to the namespace of the HelmRelease when omitted.
• key (Optional): The key in the config map to get the values from. Defaults to values.yaml when omitted.
• optional (Optional): When set to true, successful retrieval of the config map is optional and a release will still be made if it is missing. Defaults to false when omitted.

Secrets

The reference to a secret is defined by adding a secretKeyRef to the spec.valuesFrom list.

spec:
  valuesFrom:
  - secretKeyRef:
      name: default-values
      namespace: my-ns
      key: values.yaml
      optional: true

The definition of the listed keys is as follows:

• name: The name of the secret.
• namespace (Optional): The namespace the secret is in. Defaults to the namespace of the HelmRelease when omitted.
• key (Optional): The key in the secret to get the values from. Defaults to values.yaml when omitted.
• optional (Optional): When set to true, successful retrieval of the secret is optional and a release will still be made if it is missing. Defaults to false when omitted.

External sources

The reference to an external source (URL) is defined by adding a externalSourceRef to the spec.valuesFrom list. The external source is expected to be a plain YAML file.

spec:
  valuesFrom:
  - externalSourceRef:
      url: https://example.com/static/raw/values.yaml
      optional: true

The definition of the listed keys is as follows:

• url: The URL of the plain YAML file.
• optional (Optional): When set to true, successful retrieval of the YAML file is optional and a release will still be made if it could not be found. Defaults to false when omitted.

Chart files

When making use of a chart sourced from a Git repository, it is possible to refer to a values file relative to the path of the chart. This can for example be utilized to select values optimized for production environments, that you ship with your chart.

spec:
  valuesFrom:
  - chartFileRef:
      path: overrides/environment-prod.yaml
      optional: true

The definition of the listed keys is as follows:

• path: The path relative to the .chart.path where the values file can be found.
• optional (Optional): When set to true, successful retrieval of the YAML file is optional and a release will still be made if it could not be found. Defaults to false when omitted.