Kubernetes how to use Helm charts ? /
The apt or brew for Kubernetes

03/11/2025

Why Helm Charts are So Useful

Think of Helm as apt or brew for Kubernetes.

You’ve just seen that deploying even a « simple » app like WordPress requires at least 5-6 separate YAML files (Deployment, Service for WP, Deployment, Service for MySQL, Secret, PVCs, Ingress).

Helm bundles all of those YAML files into a single package called a Chart.

This gives you three huge advantages:

  1. Simple Installs: Instead of kubectl apply -f ... six times, you just run one command: helm install my-wordpress ....

  2. Easy Configuration: You don’t have to edit 5 different YAML files to change a password or domain name. The chart provides one single values.yaml file to set all your options.

  3. Clean Lifecycle: When you’re done, you don’t have to remember to delete the Deployment, Service, Secret, and Ingress. You just run helm uninstall my-wordpress, and Helm removes everything it created.

Install

It’s important to understand that it makes more sense to install and execute Helm on your workstation instead of the master node.

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/main/scripts/get-helm-3 | bash

Let’s Deploy a Basic App: Nginx

Let’s use Helm to deploy a simple Nginx server. This chart will install Nginx and automatically expose it with a Service.

Step 1: Add the Chart Repository

A « repository » is just a place that hosts charts. We’ll add the bitnami repository, which has thousands of popular apps.

helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
helm repo update

This just tells Helm where to find the « bitnami » charts.

Step 2: Install the App

This one command will download the chart, configure all the YAML files in the background, and apply them to your cluster.

Bash

helm install my-nginx bitnami/nginx

You’ll see a big output, but the important part is: NAME: my-nginx STATUS: deployed

Step 3: See What Helm Did

First, you can ask Helm what it’s managing:

Bash

helm ls

You’ll see your new « release » named my-nginx.

Now, let’s see the Kubernetes objects it created for us (just like we did before):

❯ helm ls
NAME        NAMESPACE   REVISION    UPDATED                                 STATUS      CHART           APP VERSION
my-nginx    default     1           2025-10-28 01:00:14.346439 +0100 CET    deployed    nginx-22.2.1    1.29.2

Now, let’s see the Kubernetes objects it created for us (just like we did before):

Bash

kubectl get all

You’ll see that Helm automatically created:

  1. A pod/my-nginx-....

  2. A service/my-nginx

  3. A deployment.apps/my-nginx

  4. A **`replicaset.apps/my-nginx-…

It did all that work for us!

Step 4: Access Your App

The Bitnami chart, by default, creates a Service of type LoadBalancer. In K3s, the built-in service load balancer (Klipper) will automatically assign it an external IP from your node’s IP.

Let’s find that IP:

Bash

kubectl get svc my-nginx

Output:

NAME       TYPE           CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP    PORT(S)        AGE
my-nginx   LoadBalancer   10.43.144.156   192.168.1.68   80:31123/TCP   2m

(Note: If your EXTERNAL-IP stays <pending>, it might be because your K3s setup doesn’t have an IP pool. In that case, you can still use the NODEPORT 31123 just like in your first Nginx test.)

Like here :

You can now access your app at the external IP:

Step 5: Clean Up

This is the best part. To delete everything we just created—the deployment, the service, the pod—you just run one command:

helm uninstall my-nginx

It will say release "my-nginx" uninstalled.

If you run kubectl get all again, you’ll see all the my-nginx objects are gone. It’s a perfect, clean uninstallation.

Install jellyseerr

To fin helm charts there’s this site : https://artifacthub.io/

I decided to use the following helm chart :

https://artifacthub.io/packages/helm/loeken-at-home/jellyseerr

Add repository

helm repo add loeken-at-home https://loeken.github.io/helm-charts

Install chart

helm install my-jellyseerr loeken-at-home/jellyseerr --version 2.7.3

# jellyseerr-values.yaml 

ingress:
  main:
    enabled: true
    hosts:
      - host: jellyseerr.home
        paths:
          - path: /

persistence:
  config:
    enabled: true
    type: persistentVolumeClaim 
    accessMode: ReadWriteOnce
    size: 1Gi
    storageClass: "local-path"

There’s options that can be used to set the persistence and other : Link to values.yaml