TIL - Helm chart-testing custom values

Testing your changes to the Helm chart is a must if you want to minimize the risk of failure. There are a set of techniques, which you may use to validate your chart:

• Running helm lint
• Running helm template
• Running helm upgrade --dry-run against real installation
• Installing helm chart to Kubernetes cluster.

However, all those techniques aren’t very convenient when you need to test multiple values files, covering different aspects of your Helm chart.

There is a specific tool for that, chart-testing. It integrates nicely into pipelines, has all functional which I require, with one exception - it wasn’t clear how to specify custom values for testing.

By default, ct will test your chart with the default values file, and this prevented me from using this tool.

Today I learned that you can specify custom values by creating folder ci in Helm Chart directory and putting a set of values files having *-values.yaml as a suffix. See Providing Custom values for more details.

This way I can create values for testing for example only Ingresses(having 0 replicas in Deployment) or only test monitoring add-ons.

I really not sure why they don’t have it in their README.