chartpress

Chartpress automate basic Helm chart development work. It is tightly used in development of the JupyterHub and BinderHub Helm charts.

Features

Chartpress can do the following with the help of some configuration.

• Update Chart.yaml's version appropriately
• Build docker images and tag them appropriately
• Push built images to a docker image repository
• Update values.yaml to reference the built images
• Publish a chart to a Helm chart registry based on GitHub pages
• Reset changes to Chart.yaml and values.yaml

How chart version and image tags are determined

Chartpress will infer chart versions and image tags using a few key pieces of information.

1. tag: If not directly set by --tag, it will be inferred from most recent commit that is tagged in the current branch, or be set to 0.0.1 if no commit is tagged.
   1. If the tag has a leading v but is otherwise a valid SemVer2 version, it will be stripped from Chart.yaml before its set as Helm 3 requires Helm chart versions to be SemVer2 compliant.
2. The latest commit modifying content in a relevant path since tag.
   1. n: The latest commit's distance to the tagged commit, described as 3 or more numbers, prefixed with n.
   2. h: The latest commit's abbreviated hash. which is often 7-8 characters, prefixed with h.
3. If tag (like 0.10.0 or 0.10.0-beta.1) contains a -, a tag.n.h format will be used instead of a tag-n.h format to be SemVer 2 compliant.
4. If --long is specified or not. If --long is specified, tagged commits will be written out with the n.h part appended to it, looking something like n000.gabcd123

Examples chart versions and image tags

This is a list of realistic chart versions and/or image tags in a chronological order that could come from using chartpress.

0.8.0
0.8.0-n004.hasdf123
0.8.0-n010.hsdfg234
0.9.0-beta.1
0.9.0-beta.1.n001.hdfgh345
0.9.0-beta.1.n005.hfghj456
0.9.0-beta.2
0.9.0-beta.2.n001.hghjk567
0.9.0-beta.3
0.9.0

Requirements

The following binaries must be in your PATH:

• git
• docker
• helm

If you are publishing a chart to GitHub Pages create a gh-pages branch in the destination repository.

Installation

pip install chartpress

Usage

In a directory containing a chartpress.yaml, run:

chartpress

to build your chart(s) and image(s). Add --push to publish images to docker hub and --publish-chart to publish the chart and index to gh-pages.

usage: chartpress [-h] [--push] [--force-push] [--publish-chart]
                  [--force-publish-chart] [--extra-message EXTRA_MESSAGE]
                  [--tag TAG | --long] [--image-prefix IMAGE_PREFIX] [--reset]
                  [--no-build | --force-build]
                  [--builder {docker-build,docker-buildx}]
                  [--platform PLATFORM] [--list-images] [--version]

Automate building and publishing helm charts and associated images. This is
used as part of the JupyterHub and Binder projects.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --push                Push built images to their image registries, but not
                        if it would replace an existing image.
  --force-push          Push built images to their image registries,
                        regardless if it would replace an existing image.
  --publish-chart       Package a Helm chart and publish it to a Helm chart
                        registry constructed with a GitHub git repository and
                        GitHub pages, but not if it would replace an existing
                        chart version.
  --force-publish-chart
                        Package a Helm chart and publish it to a Helm chart
                        registry constructed with a GitHub git repository and
                        GitHub pages, regardless if it would replace an
                        existing chart version
  --extra-message EXTRA_MESSAGE
                        Extra message to add to the commit message when
                        publishing charts.
  --tag TAG             Explicitly set the image tags and chart version.
  --long                Use this to always get a build suffix for the
                        generated tag and chart version, even when the
                        specific commit has a tag.
  --image-prefix IMAGE_PREFIX
                        Override the configured image prefix with this value.
  --reset               Skip image build step and reset Chart.yaml's version
                        field and values.yaml's image tags. What it resets to
                        can be configured in chartpress.yaml with the resetTag
                        and resetVersion configurations.
  --no-build, --skip-build
                        Skip the image build step.
  --force-build         Enforce the image build step, regardless of if the
                        image already is available either locally or remotely.
  --builder {docker-build,docker-buildx}
                        Container build engine to use, docker-build is the
                        standard Docker build command.
  --platform PLATFORM   Build the image for this platform, e.g. linux/amd64 or
                        linux/arm64. This argument can be used multiple times
                        to build multiple platforms under the same tag. Only
                        supported for docker buildx. If --push is set or if
                        multiple platforms are passed the image will not be
                        loaded into the local docker engine.
  --list-images         print list of images to stdout. Images will not be
                        built.
  --version             Print current chartpress version and exit.

Configuration

A chartpress.yaml file contains a specification of charts and images to build for each chart. Below is an example chartpress.yaml file.

charts:
  # list of charts by name
  # each name should be a directory containing a helm chart
  - name: binderhub
    # the prefix to use for built images
    imagePrefix: jupyterhub/k8s-
    # tag to use when resetting the chart values
    # with the --reset flag. It defaults to "set-by-chartpress".
    resetTag: latest
    # version to use when resetting the Chart.yaml's version field with the
    # --reset flag. It defaults to "0.0.1-set.by.chartpress". This is a valid
    # SemVer 2 version, which is required for a helm lint command to succeed.
    resetVersion: 1.2.3
    # The git repo whose gh-pages contains the charts. This can be a local
    # path such as "." as well but if matching <organization>/<repo> will be
    # assumed to be a separate GitHub repository.
    repo:
      git: jupyterhub/helm-chart
      published: https://jupyterhub.github.io/helm-chart
    # Additional paths that when modified should lead to an updated Chart.yaml
    # version, other than the chart directory in <chart name> or any path that
    # influence the images of the chart. These paths should be set relative to
    # chartpress.yaml's directory.
    paths:
      - ../setup.py
      - ../binderhub
    # images to build for this chart (optional)
    images:
      binderhub:
        # imageName overrides the default name of the image. The default name
        # is the imagePrefix augmented with the key of this configuration. It
        # would be jupyterhub/k8s-binderhub in this case.
        imageName: jupyterhub/k8s-custom-image-name
        # Build arguments to be passed using docker's --build-arg flag as
        # --build-arg <key>=<value>. TAG and LAST_COMMIT are expandable.
        buildArgs:
          MY_STATIC_BUILD_ARG: "hello world"
          MY_DYNAMIC_BUILD_ARG: "{TAG}-{LAST_COMMIT}"
        # contextPath is the path to the directory that is to be considered the
        # current working directory during the build process of the Dockerfile.
        # This is by default the folder of the Dockerfile. This path should be
        # set relative to chartpress.yaml.
        contextPath: ..
        # By default, changes to the contextPath will make chartpress rebuild
        # the image, but this option make that configurable.
        rebuildOnContextPathChanges: false
        # Path to the Dockerfile, relative to chartpress.yaml. Defaults to
        # "images/<image name>/Dockerfile".
        dockerfilePath: images/binderhub/Dockerfile
        # Path(s) in <chart name>/values.yaml to be updated with image name and
        # tag.
        valuesPath:
          - singleuser.image
          - singleuser.profileList.0.kubespawner_override.image
        # Additional paths, relative to chartpress.yaml's directory, that should
        # be used to indicate that a new tag of the image is required, aside
        # from the contextPath and dockerfilePath for building the image itself.
        paths:
          - assets
        # If chartpress is used to build images for multiple architectures but
        # not all of those architectures are supported by an image they can be
        # skipped
        skipPlatforms:
          - linux/arm64

Caveats

Shallow clones

Chartpress detects the latest commit which changed a directory or file when determining the version and tag to use for charts and images. This means that shallow clones should not be used because if the last commit that changed a relevant file is outside the shallow commit range, the wrong tag will be assigned.

TravisCI uses a clone depth of 50 by default, which can result in incorrect image tagging. You can disable this shallow clone behavior in your .travis.yml:

git:
  depth: false

Command caching

Chartpress caches the results of some commands to improve performance. This means chartpress should not be used as an importable library.

Development

Testing of this python package can be done using pytest. For more details on the testing, see tests/README.md.

# install chartpress locally
pip install  -e .

# install dev dependencies
pip install -r dev-requirements.txt

# format and lint code
pre-commit run -a

# run tests
pytest --verbose --exitfirst
# some tests push to a local registry, you can skip these
pytest --verbose --exitfirst -m 'not registry'