Pure Helm Deployments

At DLS we use helm charts in our services repos to describe our IOC instances. However we use ArgoCD continuous deployment to deploy them. ArgoCD is a Kubernetes native tool that knows how to keep a set of Helm charts in a git repository in sync with a set of Kubernetes resources.

You are not required to use ArgoCD, you can use Helm directly if you prefer. This page discusses how to use the command line tool ec to deploy and manage IOC instances using Helm directly. ec adds some useful version management features to the workflow that to some extent replicates ArgoCD’s ability to track versions.

TODO this is WIP

If you set the EC_CLI_BACKEND environment variable to K8S then ec will use Helm directly to deploy and manage IOC instances. You can get a feel for the commands available with ec --help.

export EC_CLI_BACKEND=K8S
ec --help