Deploying Node-RED using Helm

Helm describes itself as the package manager for Kubernetes. It allows us to quickly install and upgrade an Application including all it's dependencies.

In this guide we'll deploy an instance of node-red, an awesome automation tool you can easily host yourself.

There are literally thousands of Helm charts you can easily deploy to any Subkube project, we've added a list at the bottom of the page for some awesome examples.

Prerequisites

• A Namespace in a Subkube Project
• Helm (we'll install Helm as part of this guide)

Steps

Get Helm

Installing Helm is easy as:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/master/scripts/get-helm-3 | bash

Or using Homebrew:

brew install helm

Or on windows using Chocolatey:

choco install kubernetes-helm

Add Repo

Helm uses Repositories to store so-called Charts. Many Chart developers maintain their own Repository, which you need to add to your Helm configuration before you will be able to use their charts.

For node-red, a very comprehensive chart is maintained by k8s@home, which we will be using in our guide. You can easily add their repo using the following commands:

helm repo add k8s-at-home https://k8s-at-home.com/charts/
> "k8s-at-home" has been added to your repositories

First Install

We can install a chart using the helm install command, which takes the chart to install as an argument. Helm deploys applications in so-called Releases, for which you will need to provide a name as an argument. You'll also need to supply a namespace using the -n toggle.

helm install node-red k8s-at-home/node-red -n poc-node-red
> NAME: node-red
> LAST DEPLOYED: Mon Nov 30 19:19:56 2020
> NAMESPACE: poc-n8n
> STATUS: deployed
> REVISION: 1
> TEST SUITE: None
> NOTES:
> 1. Get the application URL by running these commands:
>   export POD_NAME=$(kubectl get pods --namespace poc-n8n -l "app.kubernetes.io/name=node-red,app.kubernetes.io/instance=node-red" -o jsonpath="{.items[0].metadata.name}")
>   echo "Visit http://127.0.0.1:8080 to use your application"
>   kubectl port-forward $POD_NAME 8080:1880

Using a Values file

Upgrading

Further Reading

• Artifact Hub
• HASS, Node-red, homebridge
• Sonarr, Radarr, etc, if that's your kinda thing