Renovate Helm Releases

IMPORTANT NOTE: As of Renovate 31.35.0, this script and regexManager should not be needed in order for Renovate to update Flux HelmReleases. As such this repo will be going into maintainence mode and eventually archived.

A script / action that configures Flux2 HelmRelease's for automated updates using Renovate.

A common way to get started on a GitHub repository is:

Configure Renovate for your flux git repository. See Renovate Docs: GitHub App Installation.
Install this script as a Github Action using the Workflow example usage below. This will add an annotation to any HelmRelease and Helm chart, required by Renovate.
Add a regexManager in the Renovate config to allow Renovate to pick up newer versions of Helm charts. See Renovate Docs: Configuration Options for more details. Combined with a regexManager in the Renovate config will allow Renovate to pick up newer versions of Helm charts.

Example HelmRelease with annotation

This is an example of the annotation this script adds to the helm chart spec of a HelmRelease.

---
apiVersion: helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v2beta1
kind: HelmRelease
metadata:
  name: ingress-nginx-1
  namespace: default
spec:
  interval: 5m
  chart:
    spec:
      # renovate: registryUrl=https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx
      chart: ingress-nginx
      version: 3.23.0
      sourceRef:
        kind: HelmRepository
        name: ingress-nginx-charts
        namespace: flux-system
      interval: 5m

Workflow example usage

A common approach is to schedule a cron job workflow to invoke this script an update any annotations and send a pull request. See example clusters in https://github.com/k8s-at-home/awesome-home-kubernetes in particular .github/workflows for an end to end example.

uses: k8s-at-home/renovate-helm-releases@v1
with:
  # Path to the folder containing your Flux2 Helm Repositories and Helm Releases
  cluster-path: './cluster'
  # Folders to exclude such as those use includes (Example: Ansible Vault)
  exclude-folders: './cluster/ansible','./cluster/docs'
  # Turn on debug logging
  debug: 'no'
  # Do not alter Helm Release files
  dry-run: 'no'
  # Tolerate yaml files with errors instead of aborting on errors
  tolerate-yaml-errors: 'no'

Script usage example

This script will only work with Python 3

# install python dependencies
pip install -U -r requirements.txt
# run the script
./renovate.py --cluster-path="./cluster"

pre-commit usage example

You can use pre-commit for updating the files before checkin.

- repo: https://github.com/k8s-at-home/renovate-helm-releases
  rev: RELEASE_TAG
  hooks:
  - id: renovate-helm-releases
    args: ['./cluster', '--excluded-folders', './cluster/charts']

Renovate configuration example

Something like the following is needed in order for Renovate to pick up HelmReposistory's and HelmRelease's

  "regexManagers": [
    // regexManager to read and process helm repositories
    {
      // tell renovatebot to parse only helm releases
      "fileMatch": ["cluster/.+helm-release\\.yaml$"],
      // tell renovatebot to match the following pattern in helm release files
      "matchStrings": [
        "registryUrl=(?<registryUrl>.*?)\n *chart: (?<depName>.*?)\n *version: (?<currentValue>.*)\n"
      ],
      // tell renovatebot to search helm repositories
      "datasourceTemplate": "helm"
    },