helm/helm

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

30178 stars · 7765 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Helm is the de facto package manager for Kubernetes, packaging pre-configured Kubernetes resources into versioned units called charts that can be installed, upgraded, and rolled back as single releases. It is a mature CNCF-graduated project written in Go, with a CLI client, a Go SDK, a plugin system (including WebAssembly-based plugins in v4), and support for distributing charts via traditional repositories and OCI registries.

Use cases

• install applications on kubernetes from packaged charts
• package my own kubernetes app as a reusable chart
• upgrade and roll back kubernetes releases safely
• deploy the same app to dev staging and prod with different values
• manage kubernetes yaml manifests without copy-paste
• share helm charts with my team or the community
• install charts from an oci container registry

When to choose

• you deploy or operate applications on Kubernetes and want repeatable, versioned installs
• you need per-environment configuration of Kubernetes manifests via values files
• you want to distribute your Kubernetes application as an installable package
• you need safe in-place upgrades and rollbacks of cluster releases
• you want to consume off-the-shelf software (databases, ingress controllers, monitoring stacks) from Artifact Hub or OCI registries

When to avoid

• you are not using Kubernetes - Helm charts only describe Kubernetes resources
• you prefer plain manifests with tools like kustomize for simple overlay-style customization
• you need a fully GitOps-declarative workflow without a CLI-driven release model (consider Flux or Argo CD, which can still use Helm charts)
• you depend on Helm v2 - it is long end-of-life and unsupported

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

package-manager deployment cli templating configuration-management ci-cd cloud-computing developer-tools self-hosted windows cli cloud cross-platform kubernetes helm-charts package-manager cncf go oci-registry release-management rollbacks containers devops linux macos docker

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="helm/helm")