When you upgrade a Helm chart in a Kubernetes cluster you can also customize parameters of the chart to configure a release.

The Helm chart parameters customization is carried out by updating сhart values.

This note shows how to update a Helm chart with new values using a helm upgrade command.

Cool Tip: How to render a Helm chart template locally! Read more →

Helm Chart Values Update

List installed Helm charts to get a release name of the chart to upgrade:

$ helm list
- sample output -
NAME     NAMESPACE  REVISION  UPDATED       STATUS    CHART           APP VERSION
grafana  default    1         2023-01-12... deployed  grafana-6.12.1  8.0.1

To get custom values, used for the Helm chart release, execute:

$ helm get values <releaseName>
- example -
$ helm get values grafana
- sample output -
USER-SUPPLIED VALUES:
service:
  port: 8080

To get all the values:

$ helm get values <releaseName> -a

To update the Helm chart values, create a new-values.yml file, for example:

# new-values.yml
replicas: 2
service:
  port: 8080

Cool Tip: List Helm charts and repositories using a helm command! Read more →

Upgrade the Helm chart by applying the new-values.yml file:

$ helm upgrade -f <VALUES_FILE> <CHART_NAME> <REPO_NAME>/<PATH_TO_CHART> \
               --version <CHART_VERSION>
- example -
$ helm upgrade -f new-values.yml grafana grafana/grafana --version grafana-6.12.1

In the example above i specify the same version as of the currently installed Helm chart, as i just want to update the values without upgrading the product itself.

Reuse Values: By default, the helm upgrade command reset the values to the ones built into the chart. To reuse the last release’s values and merge in any overrides from the command line via --set or -f, add the --reuse-values option.

To verify the Helm chart upgrade, check the new revision number:

$ helm list
- sample output -
NAME     NAMESPACE  REVISION  UPDATED       STATUS    CHART           APP VERSION
grafana  default    2         2023-01-12... deployed  grafana-6.12.1  8.0.1

To check the new custom values, execute:

$ helm get values <releaseName>
- example -
$ helm get values grafana
- sample output -
USER-SUPPLIED VALUES:
replicas: 2
service:
  port: 8080