Rancher Suite K8S Adventure - Chapter 007 - Helm

Rancher Suite K8S Adventure - Chapter 007 - Helm

A travelogue of converting from OpenStack to Suse's Rancher Suite for K8S including RKE2, Harvester, kubectl, helm.

Helm version 3.11 is installed on all members of the Rancher RKE2 cluster and on my Ubuntu experimentation box using Ansible.  Honestly this is almost identical to the process for installing kubectl yesterday, it's just a different repo and different package.

https://helm.sh/docs/intro/install/

The exact version of the Ubuntu package I'm installing is 1.24.10-00 as seen at

https://helm.baltorepo.com/stable/debian/packages/helm/releases/

And I'm doing an "apt hold" on it to make sure its not accidentally upgraded.

Here is a link to the gitlab repo directory for the Ansible helm role:

https://gitlab.com/SpringCitySolutionsLLC/ansible/-/tree/master/roles/helm

If you look at the Ansible task named packages.yml, the task installs some boring required packages first, then deletes the repo key if its too old, then downloads a new copy of the repo key if its not already present, add the local copy of the repo key to apt's list of known good keys, installs the sources.list file for the repo, does an apt-get update, takes helm out of "hold" state, installs the latest package for helm version 3.11, finally places helm back on "hold" state so its not magically upgraded to the latest version (3.12 or 3.13 or something by now).  Glad I don't have to do that manually by hand on every machine.

Simply add "- helm" to a machine's Ansible playbook, then run "ansible-playbook --tags helm playbooks/someHostname.yml" and it works.

As of the time this blog was written, "helm version" looks like this:

vince@ubuntu:~$ helm version
version.BuildInfo{Version:"v3.11.1", GitCommit:"293b50c65d4d56187cd4e2f390f0ada46b4c4737", GitTreeState:"clean", GoVersion:"go1.18.10"}
vince@ubuntu:~$