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Validates Charts

Below is the validation progress and the tested, or expected (with ?) working versions of kod that support them.

As of today and kod v0.2.0:-

  • 5 of the top 10 work
  • (1 is marked as withdrawn by the author)
  • 2 of the additional personal needs charts work
Source Chart Package since Deploy since Notes Links
Artifact.io top ten kube-prometheus-stack 0.2.0 0.2.0 3.7GiB download, 1GiB kodpkg. Requires custom values file (use package -f chartfiles/kube-prometheus-stack/values.yaml or see examples) for node-exporter to work. OCI - [GitHub]
Artifact.io top ten argo-cd 0.2.0 0.2.0 1GiB download, 262MiB kodpkg. OCI - Helmfile info - GitHub
Artifact.io top ten cert-manager 0.2.0 0.2.0 271MiB download, 54MiB kodpkg. Requires package -f chartfiles/cert-manager/values.yaml Helm - [GitHub]
Artifact.io top ten postgresql 0.2.0 0.2.0 403MiB download, 92MiB kodpkg. Cluster. Non-Bitnami alternative used. Helm - GitHub
Artifact.io top ten traefik ? ? 185MiB download, 35MiB kodpkg. Support aimed at 0.3.0. Requires deployment.imagePullSecrets Helm - GitHub
Artifact.io top ten redis ? ? Non-Bitnami. Will use OT Redis Operator instead. Uses uncommon image references. Helm - [GitHub]
Artifact.io top ten ingress-nginx N/A N/A Retired by owner. Retired 24 Mar 2026
Artifact.io top ten loki 0.2.0 0.3.0? 762MiB download, 196MiB kodpkg. WARNING: Default Chart values don't provide a working configuration. Use package -f. Uses null instead of "" for image reference values. GitHub
Artifact.io top ten keycloak ? ? Need a non-Bitnami chart to test. Non-OLM. No non-Bitnami or non-OLM public chart
Artifact.io top ten prometheus 0.2.0 0.2.0 719MiB download, 224MiB kodpkg. Requires package -f chartfiles/prometheus/values.yaml OCI - Helm - [GitHub]
Personal Needs istio ? ? Support aimed at 0.4.0. base, istiod, gateway Helm-base - Helm-istiod - Helm-gateway - [GitHub]
Personal Needs kiali ? ? Support aimed at 0.4.0. Helm - [GitHub]
Personal Needs kafka operator ? ? Strimzi OCI - [GitHub]
Personal Needs NiFiKop operator 0.2.0 0.2.0 81MiB download, 28MiB kodpkg. Needs testing on real cluster. OCI - [GitHub]
Personal Needs elastic cloud Operator 0.2.0 0.2.0 ECK - operator only Helm - [GitHub]
Personal Needs RabbitMQ Operator ? ? ? No non-Bitnami public chart
Personal Needs Open Policy Agent ? ? ? Helm - [GitHub]
Personal Needs Kyverno Operator 0.3.0? 0.3.0? 1.2GiB download, 286MiB kodpkg. Note that this references legacy Bitnami charts as subchart dependencies. Doesn't detect primary image tag name path GitHub - Docs
Personal Needs Postgres Operator 0.1.0 0.1.0 cloudnative-pg operator TGZ - GitHub
Personal Needs MongoDB Operator ? ? Non-Bitnami Helm - [GitHub]

The current definition of 'deployed with kod' is that all containers were from the local registry and all jobs completed successfully and all other pods/containers remain in the running state. There has been no functionality validation of the installed container instances as of v0.2.0 as this is application specific.

Once a chart works with kod, we shall use it and its latest version to revalidate kod on a regular basis. We'd only drop support for a chart if the author did something drastic that prevented us from continuing support, such as close sourcing version tags or other information necessary for validation.

Future validated charts planned

We plan on trying to include testing, and hints files where needed, for the top ten monthly most viewed charts on Artifact Hub. This includes at the time of writing:-

  • kube-prometheus-stack
  • argo-cd
  • cert-manager
  • postgresql
  • traefik
  • redis
  • ingress-nginx
  • loki
  • keycloak
  • prometheus

See the Examples page for the commands to deploy the above charts once they have been validated against kod.

This list is obviously subject to change. See our Features planning page for details on release scheduling of new features, tests, and examples.

We also plan on supporting the most common Kubernetes Operators we use, for our own nefarious needs. These include in no particular order:-

  • Istio helm charts (istio-base, istiod, istio gateway (ingress and egress))
  • Kiali Operator
  • Kafka Operator (Strimzi)
  • Elastic Cloud for Kubernetes Operator (ECK Operator)
  • RabbitMQ Operator (Because RabbitMQ is awesome and I will die on this hill!)
  • Open Policy Agent (OPA)

We aim to provide built-in hints file support where needed, and Working Examples for all of the above eventually.

A note on Bitnami Charts

A recent change to Broadcom / VMware / Bitnami's chart and container publishing has basically broken all publicly published Bitnami charts. You can see a discussion on the issue here.

The TL;DR is that the helm charts are still accessible via the Bitnami GitHub and website, but the image repository and tag they point to is incorrect. For example, instead of docker.io/bitnami/redis is now docker.io/bitnamilegacy/redis and hasn't been updated in 8 months. The only tags available on docker.io/bitnami are latest and a tag which is a sha256 hash of something. You therefore cannot identify the version from the tag, and all the references in the Bitnami helm charts are now wrong - so they won't install without help.

As a workaround we fallback in kod to the 'latest' tag which works fine, but only links to the most recent version. For specific named versions you'll have to use the (COMING SOON) feature of kod deploy -f <myvalues.yaml> to override, manually, the broken Bitnami references to the tags Broadcom give you when you purchase a subscription. We've not tested this so don't even know if it's possible. It might be the case that they've hidden the versions underneath tooling like kapp/imgpkg in Carvel Tools.

In summary, if you want to use opensource charts and opensource container images, avoid the Bitnami charts as they will now rapidly bitrot and diverge from the opensource image versions as time goes on.

As a result of this licensing change, we cannot validate Bitnami charts to work against kod, and so we'll look for alternative helm chart and container image providers where the Bitnami charts appear in the most viewed charts. (They will naturally drop out of the rankings over time, as more people recognise they are broken/unavailable to the public).

We therefore DO NOT SUPPORT the use of kod against Bitnami charts, although you're welcome to try it out on them and let us know if it works. Any issues raised on our project asking us to fix issues with these charts will result in them being closed as kod is working 'as designed'. Please reproduce any issues on equivalent opensource charts and report those issues instead, as we can test and validate those.

The following Bitnami charts work with kod, but only against the 'latest' container version tag:-

  • bitnami/mongodb
  • bitnami/postgresql
  • bitnami/redis

Using specific container versions

The package command supports the -f my/custom/values.yaml option. This means you can manually replace the values that specify the container registry, repository (name), and version (tag) references yourself by adding them to a custom values file and passing this to the package command.

If you don't know the location of the container references, run kod package against the chart once, and all of the relevant references will be listed in the /tmp/kod-package-MYCHART-CHARTVERSION/charts/MYCHART-CHARTVERSION-hints.yaml file. You can then create the values file and run package again with the -f option pointing to your new values file.

Using specific chart versions

COMING SOON

Today we don't support pulling a specific helm chart version. In future we shall support this from OCI and HTTPS repositories. The workaround today is to download the chart version manually, then unpack it to a temporary folder and point kod package -c toward that folder.

Working with a hints file, embedded within the kod binary

HINTS FILE FEATURE COMING SOON!

A hints file is normally generated by the packaging command after discovery of container image relevant values in a Helm chart's values.yaml file. It's also possible to create your own hints file manually to supplement the images found by the automatic search in kod. This means that any helm chart can be supported by kod for automatic container image discovery.

The kod project will maintain a library of the most common hints file for the top most popular helm charts, where required. The below helm charts also work with a hints file that we are supplying OOTB:-

Support for hints files to be added in the upcoming v0.2.0 release.

For examples of hint files that are built into the kod command itself, see the hint files folder on GitHub.

Note that the hints file used during kod package is always deployed within the package for completeness, and so you don't have to have the exact, latest version of kod to perform a deployment.

Known to work through an external hints file

HINTS FILE FEATURE COMING SOON!

The below helm charts have been reported to be used successfully. Where available publicly, we provide a link to the hints file that has been used:-

TODO support for hints files to be added in the upcoming v0.2.0 release

Known to not work

The below are known to be fundamentally incompatible with kod:-

  • None known yet

If the chart is not yet tested as working it's because we've identified, for example, a container reference mechanism in a chart that we haven't added support for yet. This effectively means we plan on supporting those chart in a future version of kod.

Helm features not supported

We currently only use the below commands:- - helm upgrade --install to install a helm chart via the kod deploy command

We plan on using the below helm features:-

  • helm repo add, helm repo update, and helm pull - to save a helm chart to a .tgz file via the kod package command

Helmfile features not supported

TODO support for helmfiles to be added in the upcoming v0.4.0 release