General Conventions

    Chart names should use lower case letters and numbers, and start with a letter.

    Hyphens (-) are allowed, but are known to be a little trickier to work with in Helm templates (see issue #2192 for more information).

    Here are a few examples of good chart names from the :

    The directory that contains a chart MUST have the same name as the chart. Thus, the chart MUST be created in a directory called cert-manager/. This is not merely a stylistic detail, but a requirement of the Helm Chart format.

    Wherever possible, Helm uses SemVer 2 to represent version numbers. (Note that Docker image tags do not necessarily follow SemVer, and are thus considered an unfortunate exception to the rule.)

    When SemVer versions are stored in Kubernetes labels, we conventionally alter the + character to an _ character, as labels do not allow the sign as a value.

    There are a few small conventions followed for using the words Helm, helm, Tiller, and tiller.

    • Helm refers to the project, and is often used as an umbrella term
    • helm refers to the client-side command
    • tiller is the name of the binary run on the backend
    • The term ‘chart’ does not need to be capitalized, as it is not a proper noun.

    When in doubt, use Helm (with an uppercase ‘H’).

    A Chart.yaml file can specify a SemVer constraint:

    1. name: mychart
    2. tillerVersion: ">=2.4.0"

    This feature was introduced in Helm 2.4.0, so any version of Tiller older than 2.4.0 will simply ignore this field.