Helmfile Support

[shibumi]

Hey everybody,
is there any plan to support helmfile in flux2 or does it already support helmfile? I know that flux has helm support, but I am not sure how this works with Helmfile. Can somebody update me about the current situation? :)

[stefanprodan]

We have no plans on supporting Helmfile as it overlaps with Flux current capabilities and is incompatible with how Flux is built (e.g. no shell-exec to Helm CLI, controller-runtime, etc).

[shibumi]

Ok this is good to know. Thanks a lot for your quick answer :) looks like flux is not really what I am looking for then.

[armenr]

+1 to this reply.

We'll have to settle for/stay with ArgoCD in that case. It's a real shame, since the developer/operator ergonomics around weaveworks gitops/fluxCD has been more enjoyable for our team than ArgoCD's has.

@stefanprodan - In what way does it overlap? Is there feature equivalence/parity? If so, where can we find an article or info/documentation on that?

[hiddeco]

In what way does it overlap?

A Helmfile describes a declarative state, a HelmRelease (and HelmRepository, and HelmChart) also describe a declarative state. We maintain the latter built directly on top of Helm, and integrating this with the former is near impossible for reasons Stefan describes.

In more detail, I do not think the design of a Helmfile would be a great fit for Kubernetes in general (but mind, my experience with it is minimal and I am going by README.md details). With Kubernetes you tend to split up resources for composability and extensibility, and then "glue" them together using references. A Helmfile on the other hand seems to be all of this composed together in a single file (making e.g. reuse of things, etc. harder, or you would need to maintain shared state between files which seems not optimal nor great for multi-tenancy purposes).

[nullck]

@hiddeco On helmfile we can make usage of "includes", like we can easily develop a base helmfile that can be included on different clusters helmfiles - https://github.com/roboll/helmfile#separating-helmfileyaml-into-multiple-independent-files
It's sad to learn that flux doesn't support helmfile.

[lodotek]

I agree. Nice thing about ArgoCD though, is that you can make it do whatever you want with it via plugins, ie https://github.com/travisghansen/argo-cd-helmfile