Helmfile: Reading .Values in helmfile doesn't work when bases are specified

[Sh1ftry]

I have such helmfile.yaml

releases:
  - name: release
    namespace: namespace
    chart: repo/chart
    version: {{ .Values.chartVersion }}
    values:
      - "./{{ .Environment.Name }}/values.yaml"
environments:
  dev:
    values:
      - chartVersion: 0.3.0
bases:
  - ../helmfile.yaml

running helmfile --environment dev diff gives

in ./helmfile.yaml: error during helmfile.yaml.part.0 parsing: template: stringTemplate:5:23: executing "stringTemplate" at <.Values.chartVersion>: map has no entry for key "chartVersion"

If I use {{ readFile "../helmfile.yaml" }} instead of

bases:
  - ../helmfile.yaml

it works fine. The ../helmfile.yaml looks like this

repositories:
  - name: repo
    url: s3://some-s3-bucket/stable

helmDefaults:
  wait: true
  timeout: 300
  recreatePods: true

[itscaro]

The reason is that : helmfile.yaml is rendered before base layering is processed. Base layers are merged with helmfile to produce final values. If using bases, the environment values are not available at this first rendering of helmfile stage.

In your case, to use bases, you need to pass chartVersion as raw content in helmfile

version: '{{`{{ .Values.chartVersion }}`}}'

• render helmfile
• render base files
• merge helmfile into base files and get envrionment values

[mumoshu]

Yeah so this is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. Helmfile needs to render helmfile.yaml template to load environment values but it needs values to render the template... For such cases, you could defer the template rendering to happen only after the values are loaded. Using ---, yours could probably be:

environments:
  dev:
    values:
      - chartVersion: 0.3.0

---

releases:
  - name: release
    namespace: namespace
    chart: repo/chart
    version: {{ .Values.chartVersion }}
    values:
      - "./{{ .Environment.Name }}/values.yaml"
bases:
  - ../helmfile.yaml