⚠️ There are no guarantees with these Helm Charts. I provide basic patching and watering in the sense that I use most of them myself. If charts are unused they may be removed.

Minimal and Opinionated Helm Charts

... powered by a Norwegian bear 🐻

 

 

Backend-focused and UX optimized minmal charts built for use with deployments based on Flux. Generally contains Helm charts for infrastructure and some related to security operations.

This is a Helm Chart repository that provides packages for Helm, a Kubernetes configuration manager. Builds are made available under Releases and at charts.253.no.

Some charts have images made available somewhere else or by me, while others were in such a bad state that I chose to simplify them according to the key principle in here: opinionated and minimal. Opinionated means that they're adapted to FluxCD and facilitates best practices such as external-secrets.

As with everything Kubernetes this is a learning journey, so feel free to open an issue.

Below you'll find an overview of the charts and an intro to get you started.

📖 Overview

🟢 Matrix Synapse: An end-to-end encrypted, open source (not free) and UX-friendly alternative to Slack, Teams and Mattermost. I currently have simplified and use this. Based on the chart by ananace.

🟢 Matrix Synapse: A proxy to Matrix servers for the new Element X client.

🟢 Dispatch: A incident management and coordination system developed by Netflix.

🟢 Immich: High-performance self-hosted photo and video management

🚧 Attic: Nix Binary Cache server that reduces the time to compile and distribute builds (intro post)

🚧 Matrix Authentication Service: Matrix auth system implementing MSC3861

🚧 Maubot: Matrix bot system.

🚧 nfty.sh: Push notification server for clients and phones.

🚧 Element Call: WebRTC server for calls and video using Matrix for signalling. Not functional atm.

⚠️ Conduit: An efficient and self-contained Matrix server using an embedded RocksDB database. Currently I use Synapse instead.

⚠️ Netbox: Modeling and docs for IP address management (IPAM) and datacenter infrastructure management (DCIM). This deploys ok but has a few moving parts.

Requirements

You may need to bring your own:

• S3 compatible object storage
• Block storage
• PostgreSQL, such as Cloudnative-PG
• Redis-compatible server, such as Dragonfly

All tests are run on the latest version of Kubernetes and Helm and no consideration is taken to vendor-specific implementations.

Principles

So what makes this repo different from others? It is KISS-Safe of course.

• Secrets and ingresses are defined external from the chart
• Expect that an ingress terminates external connection and TLS
• Object storage over block storage when possible
• Never rely on vendor-specific components
• Prefer open source
• No plaintext secrets - be sane
• Leaving room for initContainers
• Use as few values as possible in values.yaml (making sane choices)
• Use external databases and transports
• Configure for OIDC when possible
• The values file should be possible to read up on in minutes
• Only support the current major version of Kubernetes and application
• Enable service accounts
• Use semver for versioning
• Charts should install on a small scale by default
• Charts are validated for structure, security and syntax before compilation
• Regardless of journey level everyone should be able to read or learn the chart

Some of these principles are implicit and means you'll have to deploy with e.g. kustomize to get going.

If you see a chart that does not comply with these principles, please open an issue.

🧑‍💻 Usage

Exploration

You can explore this repo by using the following commands if you have the Kubernetes package manager installed:

# add the package source
helm repo add 252 https://charts.253.no
# or update the repo
helm repo update 252

# search for a specific chart
helm search repo dispatch
# or list all available charts
helm search repo 252 -l 

# show configuration options
helm show values 252/dispatch

# install a chart
helm install dispatch helm-charts/charts/dispatch --namespace=toolbox

As-code with FluxCD

First take care to setup the chart:

apiVersion: source.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v1beta2
kind: HelmRepository
metadata:
  name: 252-charts
  namespace: flux-system
spec:
  interval: 15m
  url: https://charts.253.no

A reference kustomization directory is shown in ./kustomization-components.

🤩 Licenses and Gratitude

Parts of the repo was inspired by ananace (some parts imported and rewritten).

The general license of this repo is DWTFYWTPB, but respect Apache v2 in some of the repos which were built on other's work. See the individual chart directory for details and these applies.