Installing Helm

This guide shows how to install the Helm CLI. Helm can be installed either fromsource, or from pre-built binary releases.

From the Binary Releases

Every release of Helm provides binaryreleases for a variety of OSes. These binary versions can be manually downloadedand installed.

  • Download your desired version
  • Unpack it (tar -zxvf helm-v3.0.0-linux-amd64.tgz)
  • Find the helm binary in the unpacked directory, and move it to its desireddestination (mv linux-amd64/helm /usr/local/bin/helm)From there, you should be able to run the client: helm help.

From Homebrew (macOS)

Members of the Kubernetes community have contributed a Helm formula build toHomebrew. This formula is generally up to date.

  1. brew install kubernetes-helm

(Note: There is also a formula for emacs-helm, which is a different project.)

From Chocolatey (Windows)

Members of the Kubernetes community have contributed a Helmpackage build toChocolatey. This package is generally up to date.

  1. choco install kubernetes-helm

From Script

Helm now has an installer script that will automatically grab the latest versionof Helm and install itlocally.

You can fetch that script, and then execute it locally. It’s well documented sothat you can read through it and understand what it is doing before you run it.

  1. $ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/master/scripts/get-helm-3 > get_helm.sh
  2. $ chmod 700 get_helm.sh
  3. $ ./get_helm.sh

Yes, you can curlhttps://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/master/scripts/get-helm-3 | bash that ifyou want to live on the edge.

From Canary Builds

“Canary” builds are versions of the Helm software that are built from the latestmaster branch. They are not official releases, and may not be stable. However,they offer the opportunity to test the cutting edge features.

Canary Helm binaries are stored at get.helm.sh. Here arelinks to the common builds:

From Source (Linux, macOS)

Building Helm from source is slightly more work, but is the best way to go ifyou want to test the latest (pre-release) Helm version.

You must have a working Go environment with depinstalled.

  1. $ cd $GOPATH
  2. $ mkdir -p src/helm.sh
  3. $ cd src/helm.sh
  4. $ git clone https://github.com/helm/helm.git
  5. $ cd helm
  6. $ make

If required, it will first install dependencies, rebuild the vendor/ tree, andvalidate configuration. It will then compile helm and place it in bin/helm.

Conclusion

In most cases, installation is as simple as getting a pre-built helm binary.This document covers additional cases for those who want to do moresophisticated things with Helm.

Once you have the Helm Client successfully installed, you can move on to usingHelm to manage charts.