Helm installation

Installing Helm

There are two parts to Helm: The Helm client (helm) and the Helm server (Tiller).

Every release of Helm provides binary releases for a variety of OSes. These binary versions can be manually downloaded and installed.

1. Download your desired version
2. Unpack it (tar -zxvf helm-v2.0.0-linux-amd64.tgz)
3. Find the helm binary in the unpacked directory, and move it to its desired destination (mv linux-amd64/helm /usr/local/bin/helm)

From there, you should be able to run the client: helm help.

Installing Tiller

Tiller, the server portion of Helm, typically runs inside of your Kubernetes cluster.

We will install tiller so that it has explicit RBAC access -- using a service account that we create that has cluster-admin privileges. It is just as easy to use a service account with more restricted permissions (say, just for a given namespace) to reduce the security exposure.

First -- define the service account using this in the file rbac-config.yaml:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
  name: tiller
  namespace: kube-system
---
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
metadata:
  name: tiller
roleRef:
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  kind: ClusterRole
  name: cluster-admin
subjects:
  - kind: ServiceAccount
    name: tiller
    namespace: kube-system

create the service account:

$ kubectl create -f rbac-config.yaml
serviceaccount "tiller" created
clusterrolebinding "tiller" created
$ helm init --service-account tiller --history-max 200

This file and instructions are contained in the GitLab k8s-admin repository. These instructions were condensed from the helm online documentation.