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Developer Workflow

Introducing a new package

Introducing a new package usually requires two things: creating a directory under packages and filling in a package.yaml.

The following utility script can be used to create the necessary package.yaml file in the right location:

PACKAGE=<packageName> # can be nested, e.g. rancher-monitoring/rancher-windows-exporter is acceptable
mkdir -p packages/${PACKAGE}
touch packages/${PACKAGE}/package.yaml

Once the packages/${PACKAGE}/package.yaml file has been created, you will need to fill it in. A full explanation of the expected fields in the package.yaml can be found under docs/packages.md; however, here are some simple common configurations you can use:

Local Chart

url: local
# Depending on your organization, one of the following two fields might also need to be provided
# version: x.y.z
# packageVersion: 1

Note: For local charts, you will also need to commit the Helm chart itself under packages/${PACKAGE}/charts.

Upstream Chart Types

From a Git Repository

url: https://github.com/ORG/REPO.git
commit: xXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxX
subdirectory: charts/mychart # optional
# Depending on your organization, one of the following two fields might also need to be provided
# version: x.y.z
# packageVersion: 1

From a Chart Archive

url: https://github.com/ORG/REPO/releases/download/VERSION/CHART.tgz
subdirectory: charts/mychart # optional
# Depending on your organization, one of the following two fields might also need to be provided
# version: x.y.z
# packageVersion: 1

Making Changes To Packages

As a developer making changes to a particular package, you will usually follow the following steps:

  1. If you are working with a single Package, set export PACKAGE=<packageName>
    • Note: This informs the scripts that you only want to make changes to a particular package. This will prevent the scripts from running commands on every package in this repository.
    • Note: Starting v0.3.0 of the scripts, PACKAGE can refer to a nested structure, e.g. you can place packages under packages/my-stuff/package-1 and packages/my-stuff/package-2. If you want to target all packages in this nested structure, set PACKAGE=my-stuff. If you want to target a specific package in this nested structure, set PACKAGE=my-stuff/package-1. It should be noted, however, that make patch will only work if you point to a specific package, so setting PACKAGE=my-stuff would cause it to fail.
  2. If necessary, update the version or packageVersion field in the package.yaml. Then run make charts and commit the changes.
    • Note: It is recommended that your commit message says something along the lines of Bump ${PACKAGE} version to ${NEW_VERSION}.
  3. Run make prepare. This will produce a chart under packages/${PACKAGE}/charts that will serve as your working copy of the chart.
  4. Make modifications directly to the working copy of the chart in packages/${PACKAGE}/charts.
    • Note: Do not modify charts/${PACKAGE}/${CHART}/${VERSION}/ directly since it will be overridden by changes to packages/${PACKAGE}/charts.
  5. When you are happy with your changes, run make patch. This will automatically construct a packages/${PACKAGE}/generated-changes directory after assessing your current working directory in packages/${PACKAGE}/charts.
    • Note: You should never directly modify packages/${PACKAGE}/generated-changes unless you are trying to change packages/${PACKAGE}/generated-changes/dependencies to update your chart dependencies. This directory is automatically constructed / destroyed by make patch to save the least amount of information necessary to reconstruct your working directory on a make prepare.
  6. Run make clean to clean up your working directory. Then, commit your changes to Git with a commit message that indicates what you have changed.
    • Note: To avoid losing unsaved changes, do not run make clean unless you have already ran make patch. make clean will delete the packages/${PACKAGE}/charts directory, so any modifications you made to the working copy of the chart will be lost.
  7. To test your changes, run make charts. This will automatically create an assets/${PACKAGE}/${CHART}-${VERSION}.tgz, the charts/${PACKAGE}/${CHART}/${VERSION}/ directory, and create or modify an existing index.yaml. Commit these changes to Git, usually with a commit titled make charts.
    • Note: If you push the make charts commit to a repository, that repository would be a valid Helm repository to serve your chart.

If you need to make additional changes after testing, repeat steps 2-6.

If your repository is configured to use upstream validation (e.g. check if validation.url and validation.branch is specified in the root configuration.yaml), you will also need to add this new chart's name and version to the release.yaml or else you will fail CI. If you run make validate locally, it will automatically generate this file for you.

For more information on how to do this or why this is required, please see docs/validation.md.

Otherwise, you are ready to make a PR!

Rebasing An Existing Package

For forked charts only (e.g. any chart where the package.yaml does not have url: local), currently the scripts do not have good support for rebasing charts to a new upstream.

The reason why this is the case is that the patch files defined under packages/${PACKAGE}/generated-changes/patch/* are based on the old upstream, so when you change the URL it is unable to reconcile how to apply the patch.

Therefore, the best way to currently rebase is to follow the following workflow:

  1. Set PACKAGE=<packageName> pointing to the specific package you want to work with.
  2. If the chart has not been released yet, delete your existing charts, assets, and index.yaml entries corresponding to the chart you are rebasing by running CHART=<chart> VERSION=<version> make remove for each chart (e.g. if you have a chart that also packages a CRD chart, you will need to run make remove twice for the main chart and the CRD chart). Then, commit your changes to Git with a commit message that says "Remove charts/assets for "
  3. Without making any other changes, run make prepare. This will apply your existing patches on your existing upstream to produce packages/${PACKAGE}/${workingDir} (usually packages/${PACKAGE}/charts).
  4. Modify the package.yaml to point to your new upstream.
  5. Run make patch. This will destroy the current contents of packages/${PACKAGE}/generated-changes and reconstruct everything as if you were patching the new upstream with your existing chart.
  6. Run make clean. Then, commit your changes to Git with a commit message that says "Rebase from <OLD_REF> to <NEW_REF>"; this will make it easier for reviewers to see what you actually introduced in the next commit.
  7. Follow the same developer workflow as defined under Making Changes to Packages to change the version, add back in changes introduced by upstream, and generate charts / assets.

Once these steps are compplete, you should have something similar to the following four commits:

  1. "Remove charts/assets for "
  2. "Rebase from <OLD_REF> to <NEW_REF>"
  3. "Add changes from rebasing to <NEW_VERSION>"
  4. "make charts"

As a result, developers reviewing your chart can see changes made to packages/ by reviewing changes between commit 2 and commit 3; they can also inspect changes introduced to charts/ by viewing the overall diff on the PR, since the old assets will show as renamed / modified.

You are ready to make a PR!

Known Issue: Making Changes to the Version of an Existing Package

If you are working with a repository using charts-build-scripts that uses remote validation (e.g. validate.url and validate.branch are provided in the configuration.yaml) and you are making a change that would modify the version of an existing package (e.g. replacing a version like 0.1.2-rc3 with 0.1.2-rc4), please see the section Modifying Chart Versions That Exist In Upstream within docs/validation.md for how to ensure CI still passes after making your change.

Versioning Packages

Generally, repositories that are using charts-build-scripts use one of the following two types of built-in versioning schemes for packages:

Version

This versioning scheme is used if version is specified in the package.yaml.

If a valid semver for version is provided, the final version of the chart will be the same as the version provided.

The only caveat is that if the main chart corresponds to some upstream chart whose chart version is not the same as the version provided, then the upstream version will be appended as a build annotation following the pattern <version>+up<upstreamVersion>.

e.g. If version is 100.0.0 and the upstream chart's version is 1.2.3, the final version will be 100.0.0+up1.2.3.

PackageVersion

This versioning scheme is used if packageVersion is specified in the package.yaml.

If a two-digit packageVersion is provided, the final version of the chart that is produced under the generated assets will be the same as the version specified by the main chart in the package, except the patch version of will be int(originalPatchVersion * 100 + packageVersion).

Examples:

  • If the main chart version is 1.2.3 and the packageVersion is 1, the final chart version will be 1.2.301.
  • If the main chart version is 1.2.3 and the packageVersion is 56, the final chart version will be 1.2.356.
  • If the main chart version is 2.1.0 and the packageVersion is 12, the final chart version will be 2.1.12.
    • Note: It is not 2.1.012 since a leading zero in the patch version is invalid semver.
When should I update the packageVersion?

You should generally update the packageVersion once per release.

If the chart version you are currently modifying has already been released before, you should bump the packageVersion by 1 to ensure you aren't modifying an already released chart.

e.g. if chart version 1.2.301 is released, bumping the packageVersion to 2 will result in 1.2.302 being released next.

If the chart version you are currently modifying has never been released before, you should reset the packageVersion to 1.

e.g. if chart version 1.2.301 is released, but you are currently working on releasing a package based on 1.3.0, you should reset the packageVersion to 1 to release 1.3.1.

Note: You should reset the packageVersion to 1 instead of 0 since the scripts will always introduce at least one change to the chart.

Updating Dependencies and Subcharts

The scripts used to maintain this repository natively supports managing dependencies / subcharts for Helm charts.

Subcharts can be added by creating a file under packages/${PACKAGE}/generated-changes/dependencies/${SUBCHART}/dependency.yaml.

The following utility script can be used to create the necessary dependency.yaml file in the right location:

PACKAGE=<packageName>
SUBCHART=<subchartName>
mkdir -p packages/${PACKAGE}/generated-changes/dependencies/${SUBCHART}
touch packages/${PACKAGE}/generated-changes/dependencies/${SUBCHART}/dependency.yaml

Once the dependency.yaml file has been created, you will need to fill it in. The dependency.yaml supports a subset of package.yaml fields (namely, those associated with UpstreamOptions; i.e. you can specify local charts, GitHub Repositories, or Chart Archives). More information on UpstreamOptions can be found in docs/packages.md.

Once declared, make prepare will automatically pull in your dependency under packages/${PACKAGE}/charts/charts and add a corresponding entry to the packages/${PACKAGE}/charts/Chart.yaml (or requirement.yaml, for Helm charts using the older apiVersion: v1). You will also be able to patch your dependency from there as if it was part of the original main chart.

Note: The name of your subchart, and the alias you can use to override settings of your subchart from the main chart, will be dependent on the name of the directory you place the dependency.yaml in. For example, if you created your dependency.yaml under packages/mypackage/generated-changes/dependencies/mydep/dependency.yaml and ran PACKAGE=mypackage make prepare, all subchart settings will be located under the main chart's values.yaml under mydep.* (e.g. mydep.enabled), even if the chart mydep points to is named something else.

Note: A common practice for managing dependencies via these scripts is to keep the actual patches on the dependency in a separate package and refer to it in your main chart. To take this approach, declare your dependency as a separate packages under packages/${DEPENDENCY} and simply specify url: packages/${DEPENDENCY} in the dependency.yaml of your main chart. Then, on a make prepare, it will prepare the dependency's package first and pull it in on trying to prepare the main chart. It should also be noted that it is the developer's responsibility to ensure that no cyclical dependencies are introduced in this fashion.

Note: if you manage a dependency as a separate package, it's often a good idea to set doNotRelease: true on that dependency package's package.yaml to indicate that the dependency should not be independently released. This prevents make charts from generating assets for the dependency, since it will already be packaged directly into your main chart.

Note: When adding net-new dependencies, a PR must first be raised and merged in the rancher/Rancher repository with the required updates to the rancher/pkg/image/origins.go file. This file must be updated with the name of the dependency (without any version information) and the Github repository URL from where the image originates from. This information is used to generate an artifact during Rancher releases, and failure to provide it will interfere with Rancher's CI. This file does not need to be updated when bumping versions of released dependencies.

Known Issue: Managed Files

In any Helm chart managed by these scripts, we consider the Chart.yaml / requirements.yaml to be Managed Files since they are the only files that end up going through a three-way merge.

Specifically, the three-way merge occurs because there are three parties involved in applying changes on a make prepare:

  1. The upstream chart source, which provides the base Chart.yaml / requirements.yaml
  2. The scripts themselves, which make changes to support adding in dependencies based on those specified under generated-changes/dependencies.
  3. The user, who commits patches to those files after running make patch

As a result, on updating dependencies for charts, these files are prone to having conflicts.

The only workaround for this issue is to delete the patch files manually (e.g. rm packages/${PACKAGE}/generated-changes/patch/Chart.yaml.patch and/or rm packages/${PACKAGE}/generated-changes/patch/requirements.yaml.patch), run make prepare, and redo the patches you added to these files manually.

Making Changes to Released Charts

If a chart version that you want to make changes to has already been released (i.e. the chart already exists in charts/, assets/ and index.yaml and the Package that was tracking that chart version has moved on to a future version), you will usually follow the following steps:

  1. Make the change directly to the charts/{chart}/{version} files
  2. Run make zip to automatically zip up charts/{chart}/{version} -> assets/{chart}-{version}.tgz and update the index.yaml. This might also introduce some changes to charts/{chart}/{version}, such as when you add an annotation to charts/{chart}/{version}/Chart.yaml that needs to be re-ordered alphabetically.

In addition, if your repository is configured to use upstream validation (e.g. check if validation.url and validation.branch is specified in the root configuration.yaml), you will also need to add this modified chart's name and version to the release.yaml or else you will fail CI. If you run make validate locally, it will automatically generate this file for you.

For more information on how to do this or why this is required, please see docs/validation.md.

Otherwise, you are ready to make a PR!

Troubleshooting

Open up an issue on https://github.com/rancher/charts-build-scripts.