This is part 3 of 7 of our Helm 3 Preview: Charting Our Future blog series, discussing chart repositories. (Check out our previous blog post on the gentle goodbye to Tiller here.)

At a high level, a Chart Repository is a location where Charts can be stored and shared. The Helm client packs and ships Helm Charts to a Chart Repository. Simply put, a Chart Repository is a basic HTTP server that houses an index.yaml file and some packaged charts.

This is part 2 of 7 of our Helm 3 Preview: Charting Our Future blog series. (Check out our previous blog post on the history of Helm here.)

During the Helm 2 development cycle, we introduced Tiller as part of our integration with Google's Deployment Manager. Tiller played an important role for teams working on a shared cluster - it made it possible for multiple different operators to interact with the same set of releases.

On October 15th, 2015, the project now known as Helm was born. Only one year later, the Helm community joined the Kubernetes organization as Helm 2 was fast approaching. In June 2018, the Helm community joined the CNCF as an incubating project. Fast forward to today, and Helm 3 is nearing its first alpha release.

In this series of seven blog posts over the next four weeks, I'll provide some history on Helm's beginnings, illustrate how we got where we are today, showcase some of the new features available for the first alpha release of Helm 3, and explain how we move forward from here.

We're beyond excited to share that Helm Summit EU 2019 is now official (h/t to CNCF)! Join the Helm community on September 11 - 12 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands at Pakhuis de Zwijger for our first European Helm Summit. Over the course of two days, we'll discuss all things Helm and hold tutorials, working sessions, and small group discussions with new and exisiting users.

Security researcher Bernard Wagner of Entersekt discovered a vulnerability in ChartMuseum, impacting all versions of ChartMuseum between ChartMuseum >=0.1.0 and < 0.8.1. A specially crafted chart could be uploaded that caused the uploaded archive to be saved outside of the intended location.

When ChartMuseum is configured for multitenancy the specially crafted chart could be uploaded to one tenant but saved in the location of another tenant. This includes overwriting a chart at a version in the other tenant.

Security researcher Bernard Wagner of Entersekt discovered a vulnerability in the Helm client, impacting all versions of Helm between Helm >=2.0.0 and < 2.12.2. Two Helm client commands may be coerced into unpacking unsafe content from a maliciously designed chart.

A specially crafted chart may be able to unpack content into locations on the filesystem outside of the chart’s path, potentially overwriting existing files.

Helm was designed with many distributed repositories in mind. Like Homebrew Taps and Debian APT repositories, Helm has the ability to add and work with many repositories. While the Helm stable and incubator repositories have been front and center from the beginning it was never our intent for these to be the only public repositories.

With this in mind, we are delighted to announce the launch of the Helm Hub. This hub provides a means for you to find charts hosted in many distributed repositories hosted by numerous people and organizations.

The first major action under the new Helm governance was to elect a set of Helm Org Maintainers. In the initial election we were looking to select 7 people to represent Helm core, charts, and other projects under the Helm umbrella. The election is now complete and I would like to introduce the first set of Org Maintainers.

The Helm community charts, available as the stable and incubator repositories, have long had testing. That testing has grown and improved a significant amount in the past year; from Helm linting and testing if an application runs in a cluster to now include YAML linting, some validation on maintainers, Chart.yaml schema validation, tests on chart version increments, and more.

Being a top level incubating CNCF project requires having a governance structure to ensure that there is a publicly documented process for making decisions regarding the project and the community. While Helm was under Kubernetes, we relied on Kubernetes governance. As part of the transition to CNCF, the Helm project is required to have its own governance structure. To handle this we set up a provisional governance with a goal of creating a long term one. After a few months we are happy to announce that the new governance structure has been written and approved.