Skaffold: Suggestion: Helmfile integration

[mumoshu]

Hi, thanks for sharing the great project!

Would you mind if I contribute a Helmfile integration as a deployment plugin to skaffold?

Helmfile is basically a declarative spec for deploying a set of helm charts from different chart repositories across namespace(s).

I believe it will nicely complements skaffold by providing additional benefits like

• Chart repositories management,
• Envvar interpolation
• Diffs

while allowing helmfile users to adopt skaffold for a higher-level of abstraction on top of helmfile.
Note that, AFAIK, several company including Reddit adopted to it.

[dlorenc]

I like Helmfile, but with Helm 3 around the corner this one isn't going to be high up on our priority list.

[vietwow]

@dlorenc Dl
Hi,

Why does Helm v3 relate to helmfile ?

VietNC

[balopat]

I'm going to close this for now due to lack of activity.

[sasso]

@mumoshu have you done any progress on this?

[shibumi]

Hi I would like to see this feature in skaffold, too.

[nkubala]

@shibumi if you had the ability to run an arbitrary pre-deploy script, would you be able to shell out to helmfile and do some necessary pre-processing, then let skaffold use helm to handle the rest?

realistically i'm not sure we'll be adding native helmfile support to skaffold any time soon, but we'll likely have pre/post- stage hooks added in the next 6 months.

[shibumi]

@nkubala I don't know how helmfile works in detail, but I don't think this will work. As far as I am aware helmfile does not generate a helm configuration. Helmfile directly calls helm as subprocess.

How difficult would be a PR for helmfile? I think I could try this, I contributed to other CNCF projects in the past.

[tejal29]

Thanks @shibumi, we are working on custom deploy script similar to Custom Build Script
We are a bit hesitant of adding native helmfile support since we don't have a clear ownership model for community plugins.

However, #2277 could achieve the same. Would you be interested in writing a design proposal for that?

[tejal29]

closing this as #2277 could help address this.

[tonsV2]

I think it such a shame this was rejected. For a small app I often have a helm chart for the frontend, the backend and one for some kind of storage. With the use of helmfile I can keep track of which versions I have deployed to which environments.

I think the above setup is a fairly common and it would be great if it was supported by skaffold.

When I see comments as the one by @dlorenc I get the impression that the purpose of helmfile is somewhat misunderstood.

[shibumi]

@tonsV2 I think you misunderstood @dlorenc 's comment. @dlorenc said:

I like Helmfile, but with Helm 3 around the corner this one isn't going to be high up on our priority list.

He did not mean that Helmfile will be deprecated with Helm 3. He meant that the Helm 3 support for skaffold has higher priority than helmfile support for skaffold.

... at least that's how I read this.

[tonsV2]

@shibumi That's perfectly understandable and perhaps I'm lacking some insight but I don't see why this can't be developed in parallel.

My current issue is that I have values (username/password for the database) in my helmfile project which is shared by my database and my backend.

I love Skaffold but as soon as my projects grows beyond a single chart I can't use it without changing my code only for the sake of Skaffold and having uncommitted parts so it gets very messy and error prone.

[shibumi]

@shibumi That's perfectly understandable and perhaps I'm lacking some insight but I don't see why this can't be developed in parallel.

Uhm time? I guess they just have not enough man power to do it in parallel. Question is if they want to do it at all.. and the closed issue suggests otherwise. Would be interesting to know why.

[tonsV2]

@mumoshu wanted to contribute the plugin so I doubt that it's time