Make Helm overriding manually edited environment variables

Question

Using Helm template I can specify deployment environment variables.

However, if the environment variable gets modified manually via Openshift web console, it will be ignored by Helm on upgrades even if the template code changes.

The command I use is

helm upgrade --install --force --debug app .

templates/deployment.yaml

apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: app
        image: app:latest
        env:
          - name: ENV
            value: {{ Values.env }}

values.yaml

env: dev

How can I make Helm always override environment variables on upgrade?

Please, upvote/accept the answer to let community know about the usefulness, thanks! — aga

aga aga · Accepted Answer · 2019-09-25T13:25:47

To customize the chart values, you can use:

--values / -f to pass in a yaml file holding settings,
--set to provide one or more key=val pairs directly,
--set-string to provide key=val forcing val to be stored as a string,
--set-file to provide key=path to read a single large value from a file at path.

To edit or append to the existing customized values, add the --reuse-values flag, otherwise any existing customized values are ignored.

In your case, you can export the variable and use it while running helm upgrade:

$ export ENV=change

It is possible to easily override variable by adding a --set flag in call to helm upgrade:

$ helm upgrade --set env=$ENV ./mychart

--set flag has a higher precedence than the default values.yaml file.

I reccomend you to read more about helm upgrade flags from following documentation and article.

Make Helm overriding manually edited environment variables

1 Answers