5‐Experimental

Caching

If you specify export USE_CACHE=1 before running the scripts, a cache will be used that is located at .charts-build-scripts/.cache. This cache is only used on make prepare, make patch, and make charts; it is intentionally disabled on make validate.

This cache will be used to store references to anything that is pulled into the scripts (e.g. anything defined via UpstreamOptions, such as your upstream charts). If used, the speed of the above three commands may dramatically increase since it is no longer relying on making a network call to pull in your charts from the given cached upstream.

However, currently caching is only implemented for UpstreamOptions that point to a GitHub Repository at a particular commit, since that is an immutable reference (e.g. any amends to that commit would result in a brand-new commit hash).

If you would like to clean up your cache, either delete the .charts-build-scripts/.cache directory or run make clean-cache.

Using Manifest Upstreams Instead of Helm Charts

If your package.yaml points to an upstream that does not declare a Chart.yaml, the default behavior of the scripts is as follows:

1. Move all YAML files to templates
2. Create a dummy, hard-coded Chart.yaml:

apiVersion: v2
appVersion: 0.1.0
description: A Helm chart for Kubernetes
name: my-helm-chart
type: application
version: 0.1.0

This will be applied on the upstream chart before applying make patch, which means that the generated-changes/patch/Chart.yaml.patch represents changes you introduce on top of this dummy, hard-coded Chart.yaml. As a result, you can proceed to make changes such as adding dependencies, adding annotations, etc.

Note: This feature is marked as experimental since it's unclear if there are any additional requirements necessary to support edge cases around pulling upstream manifests. Please open up an issue on https://github.com/rancher/charts-build-scripts if you have any suggestions!

Performing only local or upstream validation

In order to make it easier to debug issues related to a failure in make validate, two command-line flags were introduced.

If you would like to perform local validation only (e.g. checking if make charts produces no changes), you can run ./bin/charts-build-scripts validate --local.

If you would like to perform remote validation only (e.g. checking if all differences between your current repository and an upstream repository are tracked in the release.yaml), you can run ./bin/charts-build-scripts validate --upstream.

Note: These options have not been exposed as environment variables since an average consumer of the scripts should rarely, if at all, have any reason for using these options.