Installing helm on MiniShift

Posted by: Seth Lakowske

Published: 2018-08-11

Installing Helm on MiniShift requires a little extra effort compared to Minikube.

Requirements

Kubectl: Follow the instructions at Installing and Setting up kubectl to install kubectl. kubectl is the general purpose CLI client for inspecting and manipulating a kubernetes cluster.
Minishift: Install Minishift
Helm: Install Helm

Run Helm using Minishift

Start Minishift with a generous helping of resources if you run large work loads. For me that means running 4 cpus, 8 GB of RAM and 100 GB Storage.

minishift start --vm-driver virtualbox --cpus 4 --memory 8GB --disk-size 100GB

oc login -u system:admin

Create a service account for helm.

kubectl create sa helm -n kube-system

Give it cluster-admin priviliges, which should be okay in this case because we are on a local development cluster. On a production cluster, more restrictions is likely appropriate.

kubectl create clusterrolebinding helm-admin --clusterrole=cluster-admin --serviceaccount=kube-system:helm

Start tiller on the cluster using the helm service account.

helm init --service-account helm

Expose tiller service to the outside world using a NodePort

kubectl expose deployment/tiller-deploy --target-port=tiller --type=NodePort --name=tiller -n kube-system

Tell helm where the random tiller NodePort lives

export HELM_HOST="$(minishift ip):$(oc get svc/tiller -o jsonpath='{.spec.ports[0].nodePort}' -n kube-system --as=system:admin)"

Install kubernetes-dashboard chart

Installs the dashboard using the helm service account that was created earlier. This gives the dashboard cluster-admin priviliges.

helm install stable/kubernetes-dashboard --set serviceAccount.name=helm --set serviceAccount.create=false --namespace kube-system --name hi

Expose the dashboard service.

kubectl expose deployment/hi-kubernetes-dashboard --type=NodePort --name=dash -n kube-system