Over the past several months, we have been working on putting together some changes that would allow users to store their Helm charts in container registries.

The level of collaboration has been pretty incredible, and has involved working with several groups and individuals outside of Helm, including CNAB and OCI. Steve Lasker has really kept the conversation alive, bringing a variety of groups to the table, and Jimmy Zelinskie has acted as liaison to the larger container ecosystem, making sure we are aligned with OCI. They and countless others in the community have also been involved in making this come to life  - thank you all!

This week, we have merged the first set of changes related to this into the Helm dev-v3 branch. Although the initial release of Helm 3.0 is still a ways away, if you're interested in trying out the new registry-related features, I've put together this doc with some examples: https://github.com/jdolitsky/helm3-registry-intro

The new functionality looks like something this:

$ helm chart list
REF                                                     NAME                    VERSION DIGEST  SIZE            CREATED
localhost:5000/myrepo/mychart:latest                    mychart                 2.7.1   84059d7 454 B           27 seconds
localhost:5000/stable/acs-engine-autoscaler:latest      acs-engine-autoscaler   2.2.2   d8d6762 4.3 KiB         2 hours
localhost:5000/stable/aerospike:latest                  aerospike               0.2.1   4aff638 3.7 KiB         2 hours
localhost:5000/stable/airflow:latest                    airflow                 0.13.0  c46cc43 28.1 KiB        2 hours
localhost:5000/stable/anchore-engine:latest             anchore-engine          0.10.0  3f3dcd7 34.3 KiB        2 hours
...

You may also be interested in the following blog posts which provide some great background on this subject:

• https://blog.bacongobbler.com/post/2019-01-25-distributing-with-distribution/index.html
  
• https://stevelasker.blog/2019/01/25/cloud-native-artifact-stores-evolve-from-container-registries/
  

We are still working with OCI to come up with a final spec for how to appropriately store artifacts such as Helm charts in a registry. We are also likely to make some modifications to the UX for the new commands (e.g. "helm push" vs "helm chart push" etc.). In addition, we still need to tackle authentication ("helm login") and remote search ("helm search").

If you have any ideas and/or special requirements for this, now is the time to reach out! Looking forward to seeing the end result of this stuff in Helm 3.

Thanks,

Josh