Where does Helm store installation state?

Question

When you run a helm install command, Helm outputs information like the revision of this installation.

Where does Helm store this information? (I assume it's in the cluster somewhere.)

Answer 1

Depends on configuration

I found the answer in the docs.

Helm 3 changed the default release information storage to Secrets in the namespace of the release. https://helm.sh/docs/topics/advanced/#storage-backends

It goes on to say that you can configure it to instead store that state in a ConfigMap or in a PostgreSQL database.

So by default, kubectl get secret --namespace my-namespace will include an entry like

sh.helm.release.v1.st.v1   helm.sh/release.v1                    1      13m

And kubectl describe secret sh.helm.release.v1.st.v1 will output something like

Name:         sh.helm.release.v1.st.v1
Namespace:    my-namespace
Labels:       modifiedAt=1613580504
              name=st
              owner=helm
              status=deployed
              version=1
Annotations:  <none>

Type:  helm.sh/release.v1

Answer 2

The storage is changed in Helm 3 as follows:

• Releases are stored as Secrets by default (it could use PostgreSQL).
• Storage is in the namespace of the release.
• Naming is changed to sh.helm.release.v1.<release_name>.v<revision_version>.
• The Secret type is set as helm.sh/release.v1.

List installed helm Charts:

      $ helm ls --all-namespaces
      NAME           NAMESPACE    REVISION    UPDATED   STATUS  CHART     APP VERSION
      chrt-foobar    default      2           2019-10-14 15:18:31.529138228 +0100 IST    deployed    chrt-foobar-0.1.0    1.16.0     
      chrt-test      test         1           2019-10-14 15:20:28.196338611 +0100 IST    deployed    chrt-test-0.1.0      1.16.0

List helm releases history

    $ kubectl get secret -l "owner=helm" --all-namespaces
    NAMESPACE   NAME                                TYPE                 DATA   AGE
    default     sh.helm.release.v1.chrt-foobar.v1   helm.sh/release.v1   1      3m2s
    default     sh.helm.release.v1.chrt-foobar.v2   helm.sh/release.v1   1      2m40s
    test        sh.helm.release.v1.chrt-test.v1     helm.sh/release.v1   1      43s