GitHub PagesでホストするArtifactHub上のHelmチャート

Let's discuss how we can host our helm charts on GitHub pages and allow other people to use our charts on ArtifactHub. Before understanding the process we will try to understand these terms in the simplest form

What is a Helm Chart

Helm charts is the way you templatize your Kubernetes resources that you want to deploy. If you want to create kubernetes resource in multiple clusters (or even in the same cluster)with different values you create a template for the resources and package it. This package is known as helm chart.

GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages is a feature of GitHub that allows you to create a website or a web page hosted on GitHub servers. If you have a simple index.html file then you can host this HTML file using GitHub provided domain name which generally goes in the format username.github.io . It’s a way for you to share your work or showcase your projects online without the need for a separate web hosting service. In our case we will host our helm charts on GitHub Pages.

ArtifactHub

ArtifactHub is a web based platform that acts as a central repo for various software distributions like helm charts, OPA etc. Once we have created our helm chart, hosted it on GitHub pages, we will make it discoverable to the community by showcasing it on Artifacthub.

ArtifactHub does not host the Helm charts itself, but rather serves as a registry for Helm chart repositories. Developers can publish their Helm charts to their preferred repository, such as GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket, and then register their repository with ArtifactHub.

Hosting Helm Charts via GitHub Pages

Now we will see how we can leverage the Pages features of GitHub to host our application's helm charts. In this example I am taking a sample helm charts but you can also use your own customized helm charts in the same way

Step 1 :  Creating a sample helm chart

We will start by creating a sample helm chart

helm create sample-nginx


Step 2 : Create a GitHub repo

We will create a public GitHub repo where we will host the charts.

• Create a GitHub repo
• Make sure it is public
• Create a directory with the name of charts which will contain your helm chart
• charts directory is at the root level of your repository
• Push your charts to the repository’s main branch

$ tree .
.
├── README.md
└── charts
   └── sample-nginx
       ├── Chart.yaml
       ├── charts
       ├── templates
       │   ├── NOTES.txt
       │   ├── _helpers.tpl
       │   ├── deployment.yaml
       │   ├── hpa.yaml
       │   ├── ingress.yaml
       │   ├── service.yaml
       │   ├── serviceaccount.yaml
       │   └── tests
       │       └── test-connection.yaml
       └── values.yaml



We have created a repo and it is hosted here:

‍

GitHub - dunefro/sample-charts

Contribute to dunefro/sample-charts development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub dunefro

‍

Step 3 : Create Github Access token

Once our charts are in the main branch we need to create a pipeline that can create a GitHub release. This GitHub release will in return publish our charts. For this we require a token to be created with specific set of permissions which will then be used in our pipeline to release charts.

• Click on your GitHub profile in top right corner
• Go to Settings.
• Go to Developer Settings in the last option in the left panel.
• Go to Personal Access tokens and select Fine-grained tokens.
• Click on Generate new token

• Given a token name and select expiration date. For now I am using 7 days post which token will become useless.
• In the Repository Access select Only select repositories and chose our github repo where we are working

• In the permissions section we only need to use Repository permissions.
• In this select we need Read and write for Contents

• In overview we must have only these much permissions
• Once the token is generated, keep it safe with you for the next step.

Step 4 : Setting up GitHub Pages

We can use GitHub Pages to host our website directly on GitHub (statically).

• Let’s create another branch in the repository by the name gh-pages and make sure to name the branch by gh-pages only.
• In this branch remove everything and just create a simple file index.html to test the hosting. Push your changes to GitHub.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Sample charts</title>
<style>
 .chart {
  width: 400px;
  height: 300px;
  margin: 20px;
  border: 1px solid #ccc;
  box-shadow: 2px 2px 5px #ccc;
  display: inline-block;
  vertical-align: top;
  padding: 10px;
  box-sizing: border-box;
  font-size: 14px;
  line-height: 1.5;
 }
 
 .chart h3 {
  margin-top: 0;
  font-size: 18px;
  font-weight: bold;
 }
 
 .chart p {
  margin: 0;
 }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>チャート例</h1>
<div class="chart">
 <h3>チャート1</h3>
 <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Integer euismod diam et purus hendrerit mollis.</p>
 <!-- add your chart code here -->
</div>
<div class="chart">
 <h3>チャート2</h3>
 <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Integer euismod diam et purus hendrerit mollis.</p>
 <!-- add your chart code here -->
</div>
<div class="chart">
 <h3>チャート3</h3>
 <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Integer euismod diam et purus hendrerit mollis.</p>
 <!-- add your chart code here -->
</div>
</body>
</html>


• リポジトリ名の下にある「Settings」に移動し、左側のパネルで「Pages」をクリックします。

• 「Build and deployment」セクションでブランチを選択します。 gh-pages GitHubが処理するまでしばらく待ちます。処理が完了すると、同じウィンドウにURLが表示されます。それをクリックすると、 index.html 作成したものが表示されます。
• こちらをクリックして、作成したindex.htmlを確認してください — https://dunefro.github.io/sample-charts/
• 今度は、このHTMLファイルをホストする代わりに、Helmチャートをホストします。

ステップ5：GitHub Actionsでのパイプライン作成

前のステップでは、アクセストークンを使用してGitHubリリースを作成するパイプラインについて説明しました。このタスクを実行するために任意のツールを選択できますが、ここではGitHub Actionsを選択します。GitHub Actionsは、CI/CDタスクを実行するためにGitHubでネイティブにサポートされているもう1つのツールです。

パイプラインを作成する前に、前のタスクで作成したトークンを渡すためのシークレット変数を作成します。

• リポジトリに移動し、リポジトリ名の下にある「Settings」をクリックします。

• 左側のパネルで「Secrets and Variables」に移動し、「Actions」をクリックします。
• 「New Repository Secret」をクリックし、トークンを貼り付けます。

このトークンは、パイプラインでリリースをプッシュするために使用できるようになります。

これからGitHub Actionパイプラインを作成します。

• ディレクトリを作成します。 .github/workflows リポジトリのルートレベルにある main ブランチに。
• このディレクトリは、GitHub Actionsが実行するCI/CDパイプラインをすべて格納するためのデフォルトのディレクトリです。
• という名前のファイルを作成し release.yaml 上記のディレクトリ内に。
• 以下の内容を貼り付けます

name: チャートのリリース

on:
 push:
   branches:
     - main

jobs:
 release:
   permissions:
     contents: write # チャートリリースをプッシュし、リリースを作成するため (helm/chart-releaser-action)

   runs-on: ubuntu-latest
   steps:
     - name: コードのチェックアウト
       uses: actions/checkout@v3
       with:
         fetch-depth: 0      

     - name: Gitの設定
       run: |
         git config user.name "$GITHUB_ACTOR"
         git config user.email "$GITHUB_ACTOR@users.noreply.github.com"  
     - name: Helmのセットアップ
       uses: azure/setup-helm@v3.5
       with:
         version: v3.9.2

     - name: chart-releaserの実行
       uses: helm/chart-releaser-action@v1.5.0
       env:
         CR_TOKEN: "${{ secrets.HELM_RELEASE_TOKEN }}"


このパイプラインは非常にシンプルです。手早く理解していきましょう。

1. name — パイプラインの名前
2. on — condition to run the pipeline, here we specify to run it on each push to main branch.
3. jobs — the actual job that contains the pipeline code. It checks for permissions of write in contents which we have already given
4. steps define the pipeline steps. In which the first step is to use actions/checkout@v3 . Ideally if you are creating the pipeline you would firstly checkout the code. Rather then writing the code for checking out GitHub provides an action which can be directly used rather then writing the code.
5. In the second step we run the commands to configure git. Similarly in the third step we uses azure/setup-helm action which will set up helm for us.
6. In the last step we use helm/chart-releaser-action to release the helm chart. As for release we require the secret token which we have already created and passed in the pipeline via the token name HELM_RELEASE_TOKEN . This action will also create an index.yaml in gh-pages branch which will make the GitHub page acts as a static registry for the helm charts.

Step 6 : Run the pipeline and check if the releases are created or not

Now we will make very small change in the README.md file of the repository in the main branch so that the pipeline is triggered. When I pushed the changes I am able to see a small orange dot which signifies that a pipeline is running

• Go to Actions under the repository name and check for the running pipelines.
• Once the pipeline finishes we can go to gh-pages branch and check if index.yaml is created or not.
• index.yaml is a way through which helm is able to identify any statically hosted website as helm registry.
• Once the pipeline finishes another pipeline will trigger automatically with the name of pages build and deployment which is created automatically by GitHub to host the changes we make in the gh-pages branch making index.yaml available publicly. — https://dunefro.github.io/sample-charts/index.yaml
• We can go ahead and check releases in GitHub to observe that our helm chart was released in the Releases page. — https://github.com/dunefro/sample-charts/releases

Step 7 : Confirm the release by deploying it in a minikube cluster

To test if our helm registry is created successfully or not

• Create a minikube cluster
• Run the below command

# add the repo
helm repo add sample-charts https://dunefro.github.io/sample-charts/
helm repo update

# install the charts
helm upgrade --install test-nginx sample-charts/sample-nginx

# check pods
$ kubectl get pods
NAME                                      READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
test-nginx-sample-nginx-b95bb4f46-tbppn   1/1     Running   0          30s


Our charts are working fine.

Setting up ArtifactHub

Now we will try to see how we can set up an account on ArtifactHub so that we can show our helm charts to the community. You might also find some other community charts like

• argocd helm chart
• datadog helm chart
• grafana helm chart
• prometheus helm chart

Step 1 : Create account on ArtifactHub and create a repo

Now our charts are hosted. We need to make sure they can be used from other developers via ArtifactHub.

• Go to https://artifcathub.io and sign up.
• Post this click on your profile from top left corner icon and then click on Control panel.
• Click on + Add Repostiory and add the repository details. Make sure you use the URL at which your charts are hosted in GitHub pages.

• Now wait and relax. ArtifactHub will automatically pull the details using the index.yaml hosted in our pages

Step 2 : Verify your repo

We can see our repo being created and once ArtifactHub is able to pull the data it will also start to reflect in the searches. Now we want to apply the verified publisher tag something like this

For this we need to add a file artifacthub-repo.yml in the gh-pages branch as a metadata file which will be read by ArtifactHub in return verifying that we are the owner of the registry.

• Copy the ID from the repository we created.
• Create a file named artifacthub-repo.yml in the gh-pages branch with the following contents

repositoryID: 67d52f16-b102-4661-bfa5-9e6694587e24
owners: # (optional, used to claim repository ownership)
 - name: Vedant Pareek
   email: dunefro@gmail.com


• Update the version チャートの、ArtifactHubとGitHub Actionsが認識できるように。
• ArtifactHubがレジストリのチェックを行うまで、しばらくお待ちください。

これは、私たちが公開Helmチャートをホストしていたのと同じ方法です。 Truefoundry。TrueFoundryは MLOps、 LLMOps プラットフォームであり、機械学習モデルの開発から本番環境への移行におけるライフサイクル全体を円滑にします。モデル構築時の容易さと快適さを実現するため、機械学習ライフサイクル全体の過程で発生するあらゆる課題を考慮に入れています。