Install Helm 2 on Linux - Setup Helm 2 on Linux | Install Helm 2 on Ubuntu | Setup Helm 2 on Linux

What is Helm?

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes. Helm is the K8s equivalent of yum or apt. It accomplishes the same goals as Linux system package managers like APT or YUM: managing the installation of applications and dependencies behind the scenes and hiding the complexity from the user.

Helm helps you manage Kubernetes applications. Helm Charts helps you define, install, and upgrade even the most complex Kubernetes application. Charts are easy to create, version, share, and publish.

Helm is made of two components: the CLI binary named helm that allows you to perform communication with a remote component, named tiller that lives inside your Kubernetes cluster that is responsible to perform patches and changes to resources you ask to manage.

Helm 2 can be installed by below way:

Download installables
sudo curl -LO https://git.io/get_helm.sh

provide permission
sudo chmod 700 get_helm.sh

Execute script to install
sudo ./get_helm.sh

 
Verify installation

helm version --client

 

Tiller

Tiller is the service that actually communicates with the Kubernetes API to manage our Helm packages.

 

cat <<EOF > tiller-rbac-config.yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
  name: tiller
  namespace: kube-system
---
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
metadata:
  name: tiller
roleRef:
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  kind: ClusterRole
  name: cluster-admin
subjects:
  - kind: ServiceAccount
    name: tiller
    namespace: kube-system
EOF

 

Apply the RBAC configuration for Tiller via a kubectl command:

kubectl create -f tiller-rbac-config.yaml 

Initialize Tiller

helm init --service-account tiller