helm-dashboard

A simplified way of working with Helm.

Description

Helm Dashboard is an open-source project which offers a UI-driven way to view the installed Helm charts, see their revision history and corresponding k8s resources. Also, you can perform simple actions like roll back to a revision or upgrade to newer version. This project is part of Komodor's vision of helping Kubernetes users to navigate and troubleshoot their clusters, the project is NOT an official project by the helm team.

Key capabilities of the tool:

• See all installed charts and their revision history
• See manifest diff of the past revisions
• Browse k8s resources resulting from the chart
• Easy rollback or upgrade version with a clear and easy manifest diff
• Integration with popular problem scanners
• Easy switch between multiple clusters
• Can be used locally, or installed into Kubernetes cluster
• Does not require Helm or Kubectl installed

Setup

Standalone Binary

Since version 1.0, the recommended install method is to just use standalone binary. It does not require Helm or kubectl to be installed.

Download the appropriate release package for your platform, unpack it and just run dashboard binary from it.

Using Helm plugin manager

To install dashboard as Helm plugin, simply run Helm command:

helm plugin install https://github.com/komodorio/helm-dashboard.git

To update the plugin to the latest version, run:

helm plugin update dashboard

To uninstall, run:

helm plugin uninstall dashboard

To use the plugin, your machine needs to have working helm and also kubectl commands. Helm version 3.4.0+ is required.

After installing, start the UI by running:

helm dashboard

The command above will launch the local Web server and will open the UI in new browser tab. The command will hang waiting for you to terminate it in command-line or web UI.

You can see the list of available command-line flags by running helm dashboard --help.

By default, the web server is only available locally. You can change that by specifying HD_BIND environment variable to the desired value. For example, 0.0.0.0 would bind to all IPv4 addresses or [::0] would be all IPv6 addresses. This can also be specified using flag --bind <host>, for example --bind=0.0.0.0 or --bind 0.0.0.0.

Precedence order: flag --bind=<host> > env HD_BIND=<host> > default value localhost

If your port 8080 is busy, you can specify a different port to use via --port <number> command-line flag.

If you need to limit the operations to a specific namespace, please use --namespace=... in your command-line. You can specify multiple namespaces, separated by commas.

If you don't want browser tab to automatically open, add --no-browser flag in your command line.

If you want to increase the logging verbosity and see all the debug info, use the --verbose flag.

Disclaimer: For the sake of improving the project quality, there is user analytics collected by the tool. You can disable this collecting with --no-analytics option. The collection is done via DataDog RUM and Heap Analytics. Only the anonymous data is collected, no sensitive information is used.

Deploying Helm Dashboard on Kubernetes

The official helm chart is available here

Selected Features

Support for Local Charts

Local Helm chart is a directory with specially named files and a Chart.yaml file, which you can install via Helm, without the need to publish the chart into Helm repository. Chart developers might want to experiment with the chart locally, before uploading into public repository. Also, a proprietary application might only use non-published chart as an approach to deploy the software.

For all the above use-cases, you may use Helm Dashboard UI, specifying the location of your local chart folders via special --local-chart command-line parameter. The parameter might be specified multiple times, for example:

helm-dashboard --local-chart=/opt/charts/my-private-app --local-chart=/home/dev/sources/app/chart

When valid local chart sources specified, the repository list would contain a surrogate [local] entry, with those charts listed inside. All the chart operations are normal: installing, reconfiguring and upgrading.

Execute Helm tests

For all the release(s) (installed helm charts), you can execute helm tests for that release. For the tests to execute successfully, you need to have existing tests for that helm chart.

You can execute helm test for the specific release as below:

The result of executed helm test for the release will be displayed as below:

Scanner Integrations

Upon startup, Helm Dashboard detects the presence of Trivy and Checkov scanners. When available, these scanners are offered on k8s resources page, as well as install/upgrade preview page.

You can request scanning of the specific k8s resource in your cluster:

If you want to validate the k8s manifest prior to installing/reconfiguring a Helm chart, look for "Scan for Problems" button at the bottom of the dialog:

Support Channels

We have two main channels for supporting the Helm Dashboard users: Slack community for general conversations and GitHub issues for real bugs.

Contributing

Kindly read our Contributing Guide to learn and understand about our development process, how to propose bug fixes and improvements, and how to build and test your changes to Helm Dashboard.

Contributors

Local Dev Testing

Prerequisites, binaries installed and operational:

• Go

There is a need to build binary for plugin to function, run:

Linux

go build -o bin/dashboard .

Windows

go build -o bin\dashboard.exe .

You can just run the dashboard or dashboard.exe binary directly, it will just work.

To install, checkout the source code and run from source dir:

helm plugin install .

Local installation of plugin just creates a symlink, so making the changes and rebuilding the binary would not require to reinstall a plugin.

To use the plugin, run in your terminal:

helm dashboard

Then, use the web UI.