Write a few Helm charts and you'll understand why people want to stop using it. `nindent` will become a curse word in your vocabulary. It's a fine tool at the user level, but the DX is an atrocity.
I'm using either opentofu(terraform) or plain yaml. I'm not a huge fan of HCL but at least it is structured and easily manipulated without worrying about whitespace.
I used kustomize to build an ArgoCD install at a previous company, and I was impressed at how powerful it was. Our setup was pretty involved, and kustomize was able to handle all the per-environment differences easily, and the code was easy to work with.
We use kustomize because we have four environments that run basically the same stuff (dev with k3s, test, and two cloud regions). If we didn’t use kustomize, we’d be forced to reinvent it to avoid duplicating so much yaml.
Consuming one that is well written isn't too much pain, IME. But writing or modifying one can be really annoying. Aiui the values.yaml has no type schema, just vibes. The whole thing is powered off using text templating with yaml (a whitespace sensitive language), which is error prone and often hard to read. That's basically the main issues in a nutshell, it may not sound like much, but helm doesn't exactly do a whole lot and it does that limited set of stuff poorly.
Ah, I must have met some lazy charts then. Thanks for the correction. Still, it seems like that schema would end up a little inconvenient to integrate into your editor for writing the templates...
There are likely other "give me a schema for this example JSON/YAML file" but almost certainly wouldn't come with the nice {"description":""} blocks, nor the {"required":false} that an annotated .yaml can offer
> a little inconvenient to integrate into your editor for writing the templates...
Another way that JetBrains tooling shines, because it automatically turns on JSON Schema support for the chart when it has one, no extra # schema=file://... dumbness required
That is when you are writing the values when using the chart though, right? Yeah that's not too hard.
I was talking about the go templates that make up the actual chart. Ensuring they only use string values for annotations for example seems like a hard problem to solve. Even just showing the type and description from the schema seems nontrivial.
I don't exactly follow which part you're talking about, but yes JetBrains propagates the type and description from the JSON Schema into the golang templates inside the manifest files, same as it does with any type completion. They are reflected as their JSON Schema types, not golang's types, which I could imagine is potentially confusing to someone used to golang's view of the world but is for sure considerably better than "hurr, the type is whatever you say it is" which will be the case for values.yaml files without an accompanying .schema.json file
---
As for the "only string values for annotations," I think you mean patternProperties:
{
"$schema": "http://json-schema.org/draft-07/schema",
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"annotations": {
"type": "object",
"description": "this is the description of the annotations key itself",
"additionalProperties": false,
"patternProperties": {
"^[a-z][a-z0-9./]+$": {
"type": "string",
"description": "holds the value of the annotation"
}
}
}
}
}
and if I put the following, then the 123 gets flagged as a schema violation
annotations:
alpha: 123
as does
annotations:
_: xxx
0xcafebabe: denied
---
If you mean schema checking on the output, that is checked by the OpenAPI built into Kubernetes itself, so yes, doing something silly in golang templates will not, by itself, check the result - that's one of the major limitations of Helm's moronic choice of using a text templating language for a structured file format