Release helm charts with chart-releaser

[sathieu]

Fixes #23.

Prerequisites:

• Create a gh-pages branch (see here)

Result: I've done this in my fork, see:

• the log: https://github.com/sathieu/postgres-operator-examples/runs/3697999445
• the resulting release: https://github.com/sathieu/postgres-operator-examples/releases/tag/pgo-0.2.0
• the resulting chart repo: https://github.com/sathieu/postgres-operator-examples/blob/gh-pages/index.yaml

[sathieu]

@jkatz Please review

[sathieu]

@jkatz What's the status of this? I agree that this should be moved to a more official place (either a dedicated repo, or postgres-operator).

[sathieu]

@jkatz @crunchyjohn @andrewlecuyer Sorry to insist, could you please create a CrunchyData/helm-charts repo and I'll propose a PR to implement all this (charts and chart-releaser, then a PR to update the docs)?

[jkatz]

@sathieu We are still evaluating our options for publishing Helm charts. As you may have seen, we've put a lot of work into updating the Helm charts to provide functional equivalence to the Kustomize artifacts. Publication is next on the list.

[sathieu]

Thanks @jkatz!

[samip5]

This is the major thing keeping me from trying this out... :( It's not very GitOps friendly to not have automated updates and things.

[jkatz]

This is the major thing keeping me from trying this out.

I hope that you can at least kick the tires using the quickstart since it's designed to be fast and easy to take PGO for a spin.

There are a variety of ways to automate updates as well beyond having a Helm chart publisher -- and even from a GitOps perspective, we do regularly push updates to GitHub too, which I know works with tools like ArgoCD for automatic deployments (which I have done so myself).

For the other end of it, as mentioned in https://github.com/CrunchyData/postgres-operator-examples/pull/28#issuecomment-965521476 determining a Helm chart publication strategy is on the list of things that we are going to evaluate.

[samip5]

I hope that you can at least kick the tires using the quickstart since it's designed to be fast and easy to take PGO for a spin.

I find that to be rather troublesome due to having to fork the repo and keeping it up-to-date myself. This is why it's a show stopper for me. Also found a proper show stopper for me: https://github.com/CrunchyData/postgres-operator/issues/2941

There are a variety of ways to automate updates as well beyond having a Helm chart publisher -- and even from a GitOps perspective, we do regularly push updates to GitHub too, which I know works with tools like ArgoCD for automatic deployments (which I have done so myself).

I'm using Flux, and I know that it supports git repositories but helm repos/charts are nicer to use.

[dimitrigraf]

@samip5

I forked the repo while evaluating the operator. Once evaluated we directly referenced helm/install in the examples repository in our ArgoCD applicaton with a slight change in the values. Worked well so far. Of course, once helm charts are published by Crunchy Data we are going to make the switch.

The operator is very well documented and I'd really recommend you to try it out :)

[samip5]

@samip5

I forked the repo while evaluating the operator. Once evaluated we directly referenced helm/install in the examples repository in our ArgoCD applicaton with a slight change in the values. Worked well so far. Of course, once helm charts are published by Crunchy Data we are going to make the switch.

The operator is very well documented and I'd really recommend you to try it out :)

Doesn't change the fact that there's no arm64 images for any of the used ones. :)

[torbendury]

Hello @jkatz, is this still an active topic for Crunchy? We'd like to manage the Helm Chart via Terraform and it is a hassle to let it point to a GitHub repo.

[andrewlecuyer]

Just noting on this thread that this is indeed still an active topic. More specifically, we are currently looking at using OCI-based registries to provide/release PGO Helm charts:

https://helm.sh/docs/topics/registries/#enabling-oci-support

[ccrvlh]

Hey all. This seems like a fairly old issue, mentioned first in 2018, then Jan/2021, then Sep/2021. In our specific case, we have a bunch of folders full of manifests for several different resources, having to manually download the chart makes it for a less than ideal experience. There are charts published in ArtifactHub. But having three different charts, and none of them "official" also doesn't seem ideal.

Understand the release cycle may not be trivial, but wondering if there's any perspective to this issue. Maybe publishing a "beta" version? Given this is a 4yo issue wondering what the plans moving forward are. Is there anything that the community can do to speed this up? I would be happy to help.

[torbendury]

I would be happy to help.

Second that! Although I was not yet involved in pushing charts to public repositories, I'd be glad to learn and lend a helping hand.

[sylvainOL]

Hello, any news? it's a showstopper on our side also :/

[andrewlecuyer]

With the release of Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes v5.3.0, we are excited to announce that the Helm chart for installing Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes is now available via OCI registry.

For example, please see the following commands:

$ helm show chart oci://registry.developers.crunchydata.com/crunchydata/pgo
Pulled: registry.developers.crunchydata.com/crunchydata/pgo:5.3.0
Digest: sha256:7f50f74b0bb4fde32348af87cc740b79ed7be965f90002bcb2425e27fb02a9e3
apiVersion: v2
appVersion: 5.3.0
description: Installer for PGO, the open source Postgres Operator from Crunchy Data
name: pgo
type: application
version: 5.3.0

$ helm install pgo oci://registry.developers.crunchydata.com/crunchydata/pgo
Pulled: registry.developers.crunchydata.com/crunchydata/pgo:5.3.0
Digest: sha256:7f50f74b0bb4fde32348af87cc740b79ed7be965f90002bcb2425e27fb02a9e3
...

Therefore, with a Helm registry for Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes now implemented, I am proceeding with closing this PR.

For more information about Helm installation via OCI registry, please see the Helm installation documentation.