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Using Your K3s Cluster
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Summary

Using Helm

Learn how to use Helm to deploy and manage applications on your K3s cluster with reusable charts and versioned releases.

By Kevin McAleer,    3 Minutes

Page last updated May 24, 2025

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As your Kubernetes setup grows, writing and maintaining raw YAML files becomes harder to manage. That’s where Helm comes in.

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes — like apt for Ubuntu or pip for Python. It allows you to deploy applications as charts, with versioning, values, and easy upgrades.

🎯 Why Use Helm?

Feature Benefit
Charts Reusable templates for apps
Versioning Rollbacks and upgrades
values.yaml Customization made easy
Ecosystem Thousands of prebuilt charts

🛠 Step 1: Install Helm

On your development machine or master node:

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

Verify:

helm version

📦 Step 2: Add a Helm Repository

Helm charts are hosted in repositories like Docker images.

Add the Bitnami repo (for common apps):

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

🚀 Step 3: Install an App with Helm

Let’s install WordPress as an example:

helm install my-blog bitnami/wordpress

This will:

  • Deploy WordPress + MariaDB
  • Set up storage
  • Create services

Check resources:

kubectl get all

⚙️ Step 4: Customize the Install

You can pass custom values inline:

helm install my-blog bitnami/wordpress \
  --set wordpressUsername=admin \
  --set wordpressPassword=secretpass

Or create a values.yaml file for reproducible installs.

🔄 Step 5: Upgrade and Rollback

Update your chart:

helm upgrade my-blog bitnami/wordpress --set wordpressBlogName="New Blog"

Roll back to the previous version:

helm rollback my-blog

List releases:

helm list

🧹 Uninstall a Release

helm uninstall my-blog

All resources created by the chart will be removed.

🧠 Common Use Cases for Helm

  • Deploying Dashboards, Monitoring (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana)
  • Managing Databases, Message Queues
  • Packaging your own apps with custom charts
  • Automating with CI/CD pipelines

✅ Summary

You now know how to:

  • Install and configure Helm
  • Use Helm charts to deploy apps
  • Customize installs with values.yaml
  • Upgrade, rollback, and uninstall releases

Helm makes managing Kubernetes apps much easier — especially for repeatable deployments and automation.

Next up: CI/CD on K3s

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