Helm Values Builder

values.yaml is the default configuration file for a Helm chart. It defines all the configurable parameters with their default values. When you run helm install or helm upgrade, Helm merges your custom values on top of these defaults. Child charts can have their own values.yaml, and you can override them from the parent.

Use --set for single values: helm install myapp ./mychart --set image.tag=v2.0. Use -f or --values for a full values file: helm install myapp ./mychart -f prod-values.yaml. Multiple -f flags are merged left to right, with later files taking precedence. --set always takes highest precedence.

requests is what the scheduler uses to find a node with enough capacity. Kubernetes guarantees the pod will get at least this much. limits is the maximum the container can consume — if it exceeds CPU limit it gets throttled; if it exceeds memory limit it gets OOMKilled. Set requests close to typical usage and limits to handle bursts.

Deployments are for stateless workloads — pods are interchangeable and can be recreated anywhere. StatefulSets are for stateful apps (databases, message queues) that need stable network identities and persistent storage. If you need ordered rolling updates and persistent volume claims per pod, use StatefulSet.

env: is typically a list of {name, value} pairs passed directly to the container. envFrom: mounts an entire ConfigMap or Secret as environment variables. For secrets, use secretKeyRef instead of plain values. Use extraEnv: or env: depending on the chart convention to inject per-environment overrides.

Set ingress.enabled: true and configure ingress.host to your domain. Also set ingress.className (e.g. nginx or traefik) to match your cluster's ingress controller. Annotations like kubernetes.io/ingress.class or cert-manager.io/cluster-issuer are added under ingress.annotations. Enable TLS with ingress.tls for HTTPS.