Publishing helm charts on Artifacthub

As part of my journey in learning Kubernetes this year, I ventured today in pushing my first tiny helm chart to Artifacthub.

I had been using custom made charts for a couple of months now, but mostly in the CI/CD environment of my company. Packaging a chart for public consumption needed me to learn a few more things.

• Getting my charts bundled up a compliant helm repo format. Turns out there is a Github action which helps in creating one using Github pages.

  This gives you a nice web page where you can put a README to help people with instructions on how to use your charts.

  Keeping the README synced on that webpage required a separate action workflow which I stole from the prometheus-community chart repo.

• The next step was discoverability. I created a repository on Artifacthub and fiddled around with both the annotations in Chart.yaml and the artifacthub-repo.yml file till I got most of it working. I still find the changelog annotations feature to be awful though.

  Copying the unique id for your repo from your artifacthub control panel to artifacthub-repo.yml gave me the fancy Verified Publisher badge on my chart, which was nice.

Now the hard part - continuing to read around for best practices to write good charts for public consumption.