helm-charts

Collection of some self-made helm-charts. Each top-level directory is a standalone Helm chart that gets packaged and uploaded to a private, classic (index-based) Helm registry via GitHub Actions.

Charts

Chart	Deploys	Notes
apache-tika	Apache Tika	Deployment + Service only (no ingress)
bentopdf	BentoPDF	Stateless Deployment + config.json ConfigMap, subPath-mounted into the web root and always rendered (empty renders as {})
calibre-web-automated	Calibre-Web Automated	StatefulSet, extra consume-PVC
cyberchef	CyberChef	Stateless Deployment
freesailarr	gluetun VPN media stack (qbittorrent, prowlarr, flaresolverr, radarr, recyclarr, sonarr, seerr, bazarr)	Single-pod StatefulSet: all apps share gluetun's network namespace; config volumes via volumeClaimTemplates, media PVCs as existingClaims (optional per-category subPath, so one claim can serve all three categories). One ClusterIP Service per app; no global ingress.domain. Ingress in two shapes that mix: one host per app (default, each app's host required), or one shared ingress.host with the apps as sub-paths (documented ingress exception below)
gotenberg	Gotenberg	Deployment + Service only (no ingress)
homeassistant	Home Assistant	StatefulSet; the only chart carrying Helm tests (templates/tests/)
matrix-synapse	Matrix Synapse	StatefulSet plus an nginx delegation Deployment/Service
minecraft-router	itzg/mc-router	Deployment + routing ConfigMap + NodePort Service (TCP only, no ingress); mappings is a required value
minecraft-server	itzg/minecraft-server	StatefulSet + PVC + Service + init-script ConfigMap (no ingress); service type is a value (ClusterIP by default, routed via minecraft-router). Only the newest Java line is maintained (chart 5.0.0, #158): the directory carries one line, older ones stay published as frozen artifacts (java8/java17 at 4.0.0, java21 at 4.1.0) and receive no further chart changes — publishing once per line out of one directory is what made the lines drift. To run an older JVM with the current chart, set image.tagOverride; the chart then checks that minecraft.version fits the Java line of the effective tag and fails the render with both values named. Two cases pass unchecked on purpose: a tag without a java<N> part and a minecraft.version that is not a plain numeric x[.y[.z]]. image.tagOverride is deliberately outside Renovate's reach — renovate.json5 tracks appVersion only. Since chart 2.0.0 the tag is an immutable dated upstream release (appVersion: <release>-java8 / -java17 / -java21 / -java25, e.g. 2026.8.2-java8) instead of the continuously rebuilt rolling line tag. Pilot for the strict values.schema.json (#68), which is now binding for every chart
outline	Outline	StatefulSet, separate DB/Redis secrets
paperless-ngx	Paperless-ngx	Largest chart: consume CronJob, SMB-connector PV/PVC, pre/post-consumption scripts ConfigMap
patchmon	PatchMon	Two Deployments (frontend + backend), OIDC secret
rallly	Rallly	Deployment, DB/OIDC/SMTP secrets
rss-bridge	RSS-Bridge	Deployment + whitelist ConfigMap; ingress.hosts is a required list of host + optional tlsSecretName, so several hosts can keep their own existing certificates (documented deviation from the one-TLS-secret rule, see its values.yaml)
samba	Samba	StatefulSet, users secret + config ConfigMap
satisfactory	Satisfactory game server	StatefulSet, no ingress
searxng	SearXNG	Stateless Deployment + settings ConfigMap (use_default_settings: true plus a free-form settings.extra passthrough); the signing key is a required OnePasswordItem, an external Valkey an optional second one. ingress.domain is read twice — Ingress host and SEARXNG_BASE_URL — so it stays required with the Ingress switched off
teamspeak-server	TeamSpeak server	StatefulSet, no ingress
template-chart	—	Scaffold for new charts (placeholder xxx), never published
urlaubsverwaltung	Urlaubsverwaltung	Deployment, DB + OIDC secrets
voucher-vault	VoucherVault	StatefulSet, DB + OIDC secrets
ytdlp-web-player	ytdlp_web_player	Stateless Deployment, video cache and tool cache as emptyDirs (no PVC). The only chart with a dependency: an optional oauth2-proxy subchart, off by default, wired in front of the app because the application ships no authentication at all — see "Chart dependencies" below
zipline	Zipline	StatefulSet, DB secret

Versioning

Chart.yaml uses the scheme version: <chart-semver>+up<app-version> (e.g. 1.4.0+up1.9.2) — see the chart style guidelines for the full rules (suffix normalization, semver bump levels).

• Bump the chart version in every change that touches a chart directory — a push to main publishes the chart.
• App-version updates go through PRs (so the validate and install-test pipelines run). The manually dispatched Change App-Version workflow (rewrites version:/appVersion: and commits directly to main) exists but bypasses both pipelines. For app major jumps, update stepwise: first to the last release of the old major line (own PR, merge, publish), then to the newest major.

CI/CD (GitHub Actions)

• publish-<chart>.yml — one thin workflow per chart; triggers on pushes to main touching <chart>/** (or manually) and calls the reusable workflow below. A push to a chart directory on main publishes that chart, so the chart version must be bumped in the same change.

• publish-helm-chart.yml — reusable workflow: helm package, then a single HTTP POST of the packaged .tgz to the private chart registry. The target is a classic, index-based Helm registry (Gitea's /api/charts endpoint), not an OCI one: helm push speaks only OCI and is not used, there is no helm registry login session, and every request carries its own Basic auth. Credentials and the target URL come from 1Password Connect (OP_CONNECT_TOKEN secret, item op://GitHub-Actions/jlab-registry-access/ with username, password, charts-url); the workflow appends /api/charts to charts-url. No registry address ever appears in this repository. The loaded values are read via steps.<id>.outputs.*, mapped into the step's own env: block and used as quoted shell variables — never interpolated into the command line. load-secrets-action v5 no longer exports them as environment variables for later steps the way v4 did, so after the v5 bump every ${{ env.* }} reference resolved to an empty string while the loading step still logged Populating variable and stayed green. Each value is additionally guarded with :?, because an empty one used to collapse into a missing argument rather than an error. Three properties of the upload step are load-bearing:

  • Credentials stay out of the process list. curl --user "$U:$P" would put them in argv; the step uses curl --config - and pipes the options in on stdin instead.
  • A failed upload fails the job. Unlike helm push, curl exits 0 on HTTP 401/403/409 — a publish would go green with nothing uploaded. --fail-with-body turns those into a non-zero exit and still prints the response body, so the log names the cause.
  • The file name is built, not globbed. <chart>-<version>.tgz is assembled from the chart name and the version already read from Chart.yaml; --upload-file takes exactly one file, and a glob matching two silently turns the second into curl's URL argument. helm package keeps the + of a 1.4.0+up1.9.2 version verbatim in the file name, so the built name is an exact match.

  Note: the registry accepts a re-upload of an already published version (HTTP 201) and replaces the stored artifact, so a republish of an existing version is still silent — see #160.

• change-app-version.yml — manually dispatched app-version bump; the chart must be listed in its chart-name choice list.

• ci/helm-dependencies.sh <chart-dir> — not a workflow but the step they all share: fetches a chart's declared dependencies into charts/, and returns silently for the charts that declare none (all but one). It runs in five places, because every helm command this repo builds on exits 1 while a declared dependency is missing: before lint and package in validate-charts.yml, before package in publish-helm-chart.yml, and inside ci/run-install-test.sh, ci/run-quantity-render-test.sh and ci/run-trivy-config.sh. See "Chart dependencies" in the style guidelines for what that costs.

• validate-charts.yml — PR pipeline: detects which charts a PR touches and, for exactly those, runs helm lint --strict, helm package, and a chart-version bump check (template-chart is exempt from the version check). PRs without chart changes skip the build matrix. After the build stage, an install-test job (the same changed-charts matrix, minus the charts listed in ci/excluded-charts.txt) installs each changed chart into an ephemeral k3d cluster on the runner and requires every workload to become Ready — see below. Both matrices follow the changed chart directories, so a PR that only changes the harness under ci/ exercises nothing by itself; the Trivy scan has a fixed-sample fallback for that case, the install-test has none — bump the affected chart's patch version to pull it into the matrix. The resource-quantity render test is the exception to that rule: it runs over every chart on every PR — see below.

Resource-quantity render test (all charts, every PR)

ci/run-quantity-render-test.sh [chart …] (no argument = all charts) renders every chart twice with the fixtures the install-test and the Trivy scan already use, injecting a bare integer memory request at every resources block the chart's values.schema.json declares:

Case	Injected	Expected limit	Catches
bare-int	requests.memory: 1048576, limitFactor: 2	2097152	render aborts
fraction	requests.memory: 999999, limitFactor: 1.5	1499998.5	quantity in exponential notation

The two cases exist because the bug behind #157 — quantities formatted with printf "%v", where the float64 the null-safe fallback helpers produce flips to exponential notation from about 1e6 — has a loud and a silent half. Loud: the reformatted quantity carries the suffix e+06, the helper rejects it, helm template exits non-zero. Silent: the product of a fractional limitFactor and a bare number is reformatted after the suffix check, so the render succeeds and the manifest carries memory: "1.4999985e+06" — rejected by nothing until the API server sees it at apply time. A check on the exit code alone therefore proves only half the case; the second case searches the rendered text for a resource quantity in exponential notation. 999999 stays below 1e6 on purpose, so the fraction case isolates the second formatting site instead of tripping over the first.

Why all charts rather than the changed ones: the resources helper is copied into every chart's templates/_helpers.tpl rather than shared through a library chart. The regression arrives by copy — a new chart started from an older chart, or from template-chart before the fix — and in that PR the copied bug is in no diff anyone reads. Running over everything also removes the list nobody would maintain: adding a chart enrolls it automatically. Two renders per chart, no cluster, a few seconds for the whole repo; the job depends on nothing else and finishes well inside the build-chart runtime.

Two details worth knowing before touching it:

• The resources paths come from values.schema.json, not values.yaml — it is JSON, so python3 reads it without pyyaml (same runner constraint as ci/run-trivy-config.sh), and every chart-owned key must appear there anyway. A block counts when it is #/definitions/resources or carries limitFactor/requests itself, which is what keeps minecraft-server's JVM-sizing minecraft.resources out. A chart whose templates render a resources block while its schema declares none fails the test with exactly that message: the schema is then out of sync with the chart.
• A chart that never reaches the helper is reported, not counted as passing. gotenberg sets every computable limit explicitly in its fallback defaults, and since a null never deletes a default there, no override can free them — nothing is multiplied, so nothing is proven. Those charts appear under "helper not reached" in the job summary rather than as a green tick for a code path that was never entered.

Install-test (PR pipeline stage 2)

For every chart a PR changes, ci/run-install-test.sh <chart> runs against a throwaway k3d cluster: it applies the stub OnePasswordItem CRD plus the chart's fixtures, helm installs the chart with its CI values, and waits for all Deployments/StatefulSets to roll out (per-chart timeout). Since probes and security hardening are active on all workloads, "Ready" means the app actually answers. On failure the job dumps pod descriptions, events and container logs.

Fixtures live at the repo root under ci/ (deliberately not inside the chart directories, so they are neither packaged into the chart tgz nor trigger the publish workflows on merge):

• ci/common/ — fixtures applied for every chart (schema-less stub CRD for OnePasswordItem)
• ci/<chart>/test-values.yaml — values for the CI install (required for every installable chart)
• ci/<chart>/fixtures.yaml — dummy secrets with in-cluster connection data, throwaway infrastructure (postgres/redis/dex), static hostPath PVs/StorageClasses where the chart pins a storage class or needs RWX, and seed jobs (e.g. synapse generate)
• ci/<chart>/fixtures.env.yaml — fixtures that need a value which must not be committed. The file holds ${VARIABLE} placeholders and nothing else; ci/run-install-test.sh renders it with envsubst and pipes the result straight into kubectl (never printed). Substitution is restricted to the names from REQUIRED_ENV, so an undeclared variable is never filled in and no unrelated $… in the manifest is touched
• ci/<chart>/settings.env — optional overrides: INSTALL_TIMEOUT for slow starters, and REQUIRED_ENV="VAR_A VAR_B" to declare the variables fixtures.env.yaml needs. A missing or empty declared variable fails the install-test loudly, naming the variable — it never skips the chart. Skipping would restore exactly the green-but-meaningless signal this mechanism exists to remove; the one legitimate case of absent secrets, a PR from a fork, belongs in an if on the workflow job rather than in the script
• ci/excluded-charts.txt — charts that cannot run in CI, one per line as <chart> <justification>. Currently: satisfactory (multi-GB image + 10GB+ Steam download), template-chart (scaffold with placeholder image). The justification is mandatory: a line carrying only a chart name is deliberately not an exclusion, because a bare name would drop a chart out of CI with nothing to review. An excluded chart gets no install-test job at all — see below

freesailarr is the only chart using fixtures.env.yaml today: gluetun needs a real Wireguard key, or it never completes a handshake and no app container behind its kill switch becomes Ready. The install-test job loads the key from 1Password Connect for that chart only, using the same pattern as publish-helm-chart.yml — steps.<id>.outputs.* into the step's own env:, quoted, with :? guards that name the missing op:// field before the cluster is even created. The key in that item is a CI-only Mullvad key, deliberately not the production one: Mullvad ties an address to a key and routes the tunnel to the endpoint it saw last, so a shared key would make every PR run pull the tunnel out from under the running stack — with the symptom in the cluster and the cause in a pull request.

An excluded chart is dropped from the matrix, not skipped inside its job (#231). It used to get a job that ran the script, printed SKIP and exited 0 — and GitHub knows only the exit code, so the check list showed Install-test satisfactory ✓ for a chart whose image was never pulled, indistinguishable from one that really came up in the cluster. detect-changed-charts now removes the excluded charts before the matrix is built, so no job exists for them and nothing claims they passed. Because an absence on its own says nothing, that job writes every excluded chart of the PR with its documented justification into the job summary — a Skipped would only say "not run", and why is the question a review actually asks. The list is parsed in exactly one place: ci/run-install-test.sh --list-excluded emits <chart><TAB><reason> and the workflow calls it instead of re-implementing the format in YAML, since a second parser would be a second chance to select different charts — silently, and in either direction. The script keeps its own SKIP branch for local runs. What cannot be done instead: deciding per chart in an if on the install-test job, to get a visible Skipped entry rather than an absent one. GitHub rejects it with context "matrix" is not allowed here — jobs.<id>.if is evaluated before the matrix is expanded, so the matrix context does not exist there, and the whole workflow ends in failure with zero jobs created (measured on the closed PR #233).

Fixture images avoid Docker Hub where possible (public.ecr.aws/ghcr.io) to dodge runner rate limits. The job blocks the PR on failure — the stabilization phase of #22 ended when Renovate started automerging patch/minor updates, since a chart that no longer starts must not reach main and publish unattended. When adding a new chart, add its ci/<chart>/ fixtures (or an entry in ci/excluded-charts.txt) — the install-test fails if both are missing. The script also runs locally against any existing cluster: k3d cluster create t && ci/run-install-test.sh <chart> && k3d cluster delete t.

Dependency updates (Renovate)

Renovate runs as the self-hosted jlab-renovate GitHub App. Its config is renovate.json5 in the repo root (JSON5 for the inline reasoning; requires Renovate >= 41 for managerFilePatterns/customType). There must be exactly one config file — do not add a second renovate.json or .github/renovate.json.

What Renovate keeps current:

What	How
Chart app versions (appVersion: in Chart.yaml)	One customManagers entry per chart, hard-coding the image repository
Sidecar/init images in values.yaml (nginx, guacd, busybox, alpine)	Built-in helm-values manager
All images of freesailarr, including its main one	Built-in helm-values manager — the chart pins every tag in values.yaml and has no app-version block
GitHub Actions	Built-in github-actions manager
Tool versions pinned as workflow env vars (TRIVY_VERSION)	# renovate: datasource=… depName=… comment above the line

Each chart renders its main image as <repo>:{{ .Chart.AppVersion }} — repository in the template, version in Chart.yaml. Renovate cannot join two files, so the mapping lives in renovate.json5, one block per chart. It is deliberately not a # renovate: comment inside each Chart.yaml: that would touch all chart directories and force a version bump plus a publish per chart for a pure comment change. Charts whose tags carry a flavour or date suffix (apache-tika, minecraft-server, rss-bridge, searxng, teamspeak-server) override versioning in their block; the reasoning sits next to each one.

One rule those overrides share, learned from searxng and worth knowing before writing the next one: a capture group is a claim about how the value is compared. Renovate's regex versioning parses major, minor, patch, build and revision with Number.parseInt (modules/versioning/regex/index.js, _parse), so a non-numeric commit hash captured as build becomes whatever digits lead it — 9fea41204 is 9, 777ba8fa4 is 777, and a hash starting with a letter is NaN. Measured on renovate 41.173.1 and 44.48.0, that makes Renovate offer an image pushed earlier the same day as an update to a newer one, unattended under the patch/minor automerge rule. Parts of a tag that carry no ordering belong outside every group: the anchored pattern still requires them to be there, they simply take no part in the comparison. prerelease is not the way out either — it sorts correctly but marks every tag isStable === false, which hands the whole chart to ignoreUnstable. freesailarr has no block on purpose — see the images exception above; a block would either duplicate the helm-values updates or rewrite an appVersion that selects no image.

A consequence of pinning every tag in values.yaml: ci/renovate-bump-chart.sh sees an unchanged appVersion and bumps the chart patch. That holds for all nine images alike — none of them is special — and it is the intended outcome, since appVersion here is the chart's own marker rather than a tracked upstream version.

Two dependencies are constrained beyond their versioning. nginx (the Synapse delegation sidecar) is limited to even minors via allowedVersions. nginx numbers its release branches by minor — even is stable, odd is mainline — and the chart belongs on stable. Patch updates inside the stable branch still flow through normally. The constraint tolerates a variant suffix (1.30.4-alpine) on purpose: docker versioning only ever offers candidates carrying the current tag's suffix, so a suffix-blind constraint would silently freeze nginx the day the sidecar moves to a slimmer base image — a switch to 1.30.4-alpine that #84 has commissioned a check on — with no error and no warning.

linuxserver/qbittorrent (freesailarr) excludes two tags by name, 14.3.9 and 20.04.1. They are leftovers from earlier linuxserver tagging schemes, and docker versioning sorts both above every real release, so Renovate offers them as major updates — PRs #152 and #153 were exactly that. They are named rather than cut off with an upper bound like <10, because a bound would eventually reject a genuine major, while two finished artifacts cannot grow and therefore cannot hide a future release. The same guard as for nginx applies and was run: a lookup from currentValue 4.6.4 still offers 5.2.3 as a major, so the filter does not silently empty the update list. That fixture also shows the cost of leaving it alone — without the rule the very same lookup offers 20.04.1 and never mentions the real 5.2.3, since Renovate fills the major bucket only once.

Not managed: ci/** (install-test fixtures pin throwaway infrastructure to major lines on purpose) and template-chart/** (placeholder image). A consequence worth knowing: ci/matrix-synapse/fixtures.yaml pins a Synapse image that Renovate will not follow — bump it by hand when the chart moves a major.

The version-bump hook

Renovate only rewrites appVersion: or an image tag; it knows nothing about version: <chart-semver>+up<app-version>. Left alone, every chart PR would fail the build-chart version check. ci/renovate-bump-chart.sh <chart-dir> closes that gap and is wired up as a postUpgradeTasks command:

• app major changed → chart major (6.0.0 → 7.0.0), matching "runtime behavior changes" in the semver conventions
• anything else (plain app update, sidecar image) → chart patch
• the +up suffix is recomputed from the new appVersion, dashes normalized to dots

Everything is derived from the base commit, so the script is idempotent across the multiple updates a single Renovate branch can carry.

One-time setup outside this repo: postUpgradeTasks only runs on self-hosted Renovate and only when the command is allow-listed in the instance config:

allowedCommands: ["^ci/renovate-bump-chart\\.sh"]

Without that entry Renovate skips the task without an error and every chart PR stays red on the version check.

If the dependency dashboard reports Failed to look up github-releases package …: no-result for third-party repos, that is the instance's GitHub credentials, not this config: a GitHub App installation token is not a good fit for looking up repos the app is not installed on. Give the instance a separate read-only PAT as GITHUB_COM_TOKEN for github.com datasource lookups.

PR policy

• Automerge for patch, minor and digest updates, after a minimumReleaseAge of 3 days and only once the PR pipeline is green — install-test included, which is why that job no longer runs with continue-on-error. Minor is in scope because the sidecar images barely move in patch steps (alpine 3.22 → 3.24, nginx 1.30.4 → 1.31.4 are both minor), so a patch-only rule would practically never fire. Renovate merges itself rather than using GitHub auto-merge, which would merge immediately as long as main has no required status checks. Majors are merged by hand.
• Majors arrive one line at a time (separateMultipleMajor): a v1 → v3 jump produces a PR for the latest v2 first and then one for v3 — the stepwise procedure the versioning section requires.
• prConcurrentLimit: 10 / prHourlyLimit: 4 keep the k3d install-tests from all starting at once.
• The manually dispatched change-app-version.yml still exists for one-off bumps, but the normal path for app updates is now a Renovate PR.

Creating a new chart

1. Copy template-chart/ to <chart-name>/ and replace every xxx placeholder: template file names (xxx.deployment.yaml → <app>.deployment.yaml), Chart.yaml, the values.yaml keys, the .Values.xxx.* references inside the templates, and both the xxx. helper prefixes and the values paths in values.schema.json. Then walk the six points in "Values that must not lie" below — the schema and the null-safe fallbacks are copied with the template, but their content is chart-specific and wrong until you adapt it. The same goes for templates/NOTES.txt: it comes with the template as a worked example and is placeholder text until you replace it with what an operator of your app needs after the install (see "Everything else" below); its leading {{/* … */}} block explains the bar and is meant to be deleted.
2. Add .github/workflows/publish-<chart-name>.yml (copy an existing one, e.g. publish-outline.yml).
3. Add the chart name to the choice list in .github/workflows/change-app-version.yml.
4. Add a customManagers block for the chart's main image in renovate.json5 (copy a neighbouring one, swap managerFilePatterns and depNameTemplate) — without it the chart's app version is never updated. Check the image's tag list first: if it carries a flavour, date or prerelease suffix, add a versioningTemplate with a comment saying why. Floating tags belong outside the pattern: ytdlp-web-player anchors its versioning regex on the v prefix precisely so latest and stable — both of which move — can never be selected.
5. Only if the chart needs a dependency: read "Chart dependencies" in the style guidelines first, it is a bar rather than a formality. Nothing has to be added to the pipelines — ci/helm-dependencies.sh already runs everywhere and keys off the dependencies: block — but the subchart's own updates then depend entirely on Renovate's built-in helmv3 manager plus a chart-version bump, which is the part to write down at the pinned version.

Validate locally with:

helm lint --strict <chart-name>
helm template <chart-name> --set ingress.domain=example.com --set ingress.clusterIssuer=letsencrypt

(required values vary per chart)

For runtime verification (do the workloads actually start, do probes/security settings hold?), use a throwaway local k3d cluster: k3d cluster create <name>, apply a stub CRD for OnePasswordItem plus dummy secrets (and throwaway postgres/redis pods where the app needs them), helm install the chart, watch pod readiness/events, then k3d cluster delete <name>.

Chart style guidelines

These guidelines are binding for every current and future chart in this repo. They are the consolidated end state of the conventions overhaul (#32, batches 0–4); template-chart/ is the reference implementation.

1. Naming

• Resources are named {{ .Release.Name }}-{{ .Chart.Name }}-<kind> (e.g. ...-deployment, ...-sfs, ...-service, ...-secret, ...-configmap, ...-ingress, ...-pvc).
• Template files are named <app>.<kind>.yaml; stateful apps use a StatefulSet in a <app>.sfs.yaml template instead of a deployment.
• Documented exception — existing PVC names: PVCs of already-published charts keep their historical names even where they deviate from the scheme. Renaming a PVC makes Kubernetes provision a new, empty volume, so a rename would orphan the existing data. New charts name PVCs {{ .Release.Name }}-{{ .Chart.Name }}-pvc per the scheme.
• StatefulSet renames are possible (data survives because the charts use standalone PVC templates, not volumeClaimTemplates) but only ship in a major-bump PR with a one-time migration note: kubectl delete statefulset <old> --cascade=orphan (and delete the leftover old pod) before upgrading.

2. Versioning

• Chart.yaml uses version: <chart-semver>+up<appVersion>; the +up suffix matches appVersion, with dashes normalized to dots (e.g. 0.0.36-beta → +up0.0.36.beta). appVersion is the exact image tag of the main app image.
• Semver rules for the chart part:
  • Patch: bug fixes without behavior or values-schema change; plain app-version updates.
  • Minor: additive, backward-compatible changes (new optional values with unchanged defaults).
  • Major: runtime behavior changes or breaking values changes (e.g. resource renames, probes, security hardening, values that become required).
• Any push to main touching a chart directory publishes that chart, so the version must be bumped in the same change.

3. Images

• The main app image tag comes from {{ .Chart.AppVersion }} — never hardcoded.
• Documented exception — freesailarr: the chart bundles nine independently versioned upstreams, so none of them is "the" app version. No tag comes from appVersion; all nine images are pinned as <app>.image.repository / <app>.image.tag in values.yaml, which is also what puts every one of them under the built-in helm-values manager. Its appVersion is the chart's own version marker, freely chosen and tied to no upstream — raised by hand when a new edition of the chart is marked as a whole. Consequently the chart has no block in renovate.json5 and is not in the change-app-version.yml choice list.
• Documented exception — minecraft-server: the only chart whose main image tag can be overridden, through image.tagOverride (#158, empty by default — the tag still comes from appVersion). appVersion is the tag and therefore fixes the JVM, and since chart 5.0.0 only the newest Java line is maintained out of this one directory; the older lines stay published as frozen chart versions (java8 and java17 at 4.0.0, java21 at 4.1.0) and never receive another change. Without the override, running an older JVM would mean installing a frozen chart and giving up every later fix — so the line is a decision at rollout time rather than a property of the chart. The override is named tagOverride, not tag, because it decouples the running image from the chart version, and it is deliberately outside Renovate's reach (renovate.json5 tracks the appVersion in Chart.yaml and nothing else). The chart checks the pairing itself: the Java line of the effective tag against minecraft.version, failing the render with both values named — a mismatch used to install silently and only break the container afterwards.
• Auxiliary images (sidecars, init containers, secondary workloads — e.g. the delegation nginx in matrix-synapse, guacd in patchmon, busybox init/consume images in paperless-ngx) are pinned via values instead of being hardcoded in templates, and their pinned versions are reviewed alongside every app-version update round.

4. Ingress

• ingress.domain and ingress.clusterIssuer (cert-manager) are required values without defaults — every installation sets both explicitly; they are the only values needed for a default install.
• ingress.className selects the ingress class and defaults to nginx.
• ingress.annotations takes optional extra annotations that are merged with the cert-manager cluster-issuer annotation the chart always sets.
• The TLS secret is named tls-<release>-<chart>-ingress.
• Documented exception — homeassistant: keeps its upstream-style flexible ingress values (host/tls lists, no required values); only its ingress.className default follows the standard (nginx, clearable to omit the field).
• A shared domain with sub-paths is the second admissible ingress shape. Where a chart exposes several apps, they may either each take a host of their own or share one host and be told apart by path (domain.tld/sonarr, domain.tld/radarr, …) — one DNS name and one certificate for the whole bundle. The rules for the shared shape: the domain is a single value (ingress.host), each app's path is its own value defaulting to /<app>, the paths render in one Ingress object <release>-<chart>-ingress with the standard TLS secret tls-<release>-<chart>-ingress, and an app that carries a host of its own always wins and keeps its own object — so both shapes mix without extra values. An app that needs a per-path proxy annotation (rewrite-target is per object, not per path) gets its own object on the same host, repeating the same TLS secret name and omitting the cert-manager annotation, so that exactly one certificate is requested. Apps that cannot serve a base path must be rendered at / or refused with a fail — never rendered somewhere they provably cannot work.
• Documented exception — freesailarr: the chart bundles several independently exposed apps in one pod, so it has no ingress.domain. It offers both shapes. By default each app carries its own <app>.ingress.enabled plus a required <app>.ingress.host (required only while that app's ingress is enabled and it is not on the shared domain) and renders its own Ingress object <release>-<chart>-<app>-ingress with its own TLS secret tls-<release>-<chart>-<app>-ingress. Setting the global ingress.host switches every app without a host of its own to the shared-domain shape under <app>.ingress.path; qBittorrent (no base path, needs a prefix-stripping rewrite) gets the extra object described above, and seerr is pinned to /. clusterIssuer, className and annotations stay global defaults under ingress. and are overridable per app.

5. Security hardening

• Defaults on every workload: automountServiceAccountToken: false, non-root user, readOnlyRootFilesystem: true, all capabilities dropped, allowPrivilegeEscalation: false.
• Pod and container contexts are values-configurable via securityContext.pod / securityContext.container.
• Writable paths (e.g. /tmp, nginx cache dirs, s6-overlay's /run) are emptyDirs so the root filesystem stays read-only.
• Where an image cannot satisfy the full standard (e.g. Home Assistant must start as root for s6-overlay, paperless needs a root init container to hand over /run, samba needs its capabilities), the deviation is minimal and must be justified with a comment in that chart's values.yaml.

6. Probes

• Every workload has liveness, readiness and startup probes (documented exception: the paperless-ngx consume CronJob).
• Probes are values-configurable with calibrated defaults (the startup probe gates liveness/readiness; its budget is documented in a values comment per chart).

7. Resources (auto-limits)

• Resource requests ship as chart defaults in values.yaml and are user-overridable.
• Limits are computed by a per-chart _helpers.tpl helper (reference implementation in template-chart/templates/_helpers.tpl): an explicitly set limit always wins, missing memory and ephemeral-storage limits default to resources.limitFactor × the request (factor default 3), and a CPU limit is only rendered when set explicitly — otherwise CPU stays unlimited (it is compressible, throttling instead of OOM-killing). The helper is copied into every chart rather than shared through a library chart — which would be a second artifact to publish, version and pull for a helper that changes about once a year; the resource-quantity render test above exists because a copy can carry an old bug into a diff nobody reads.

8. Secrets

• Secrets are 1Password OnePasswordItem CRs: values expose secrets.<name>SecretRef holding an op:// item path; the 1Password operator materializes the Kubernetes Secret in-cluster.

9. Config changes must restart the workload (#82)

• Every workload that consumes a ConfigMap carries a checksum/config annotation on its pod template — one line per ConfigMap it consumes:

  template:
    metadata:
      annotations:
        checksum/config: {{ include (print $.Template.BasePath "/<chart>.configmap.yaml") . | sha256sum }}
  

  Reference implementation: template-chart/templates/xxx.deployment.yaml and xxx.sfs.yaml. Where a workload consumes several ConfigMaps, use one annotation per file with a distinguishing suffix (checksum/config-<name>).

• Why it is mandatory, not optional: without it a changed ConfigMap does not change the pod template, so nothing restarts and the running container keeps the old config — silently. subPath mounts (the usual form here) are never refreshed by the kubelet at all, and most apps read their config only at start. In #82 this produced a real outage: the router kept routing to Services that no longer existed while every bundle was green and the pod was Ready.

• The annotation is content-based, not time-based: the hash is taken over the rendered ConfigMap, so an unchanged config renders an identical hash and helm upgrade is a no-op. It never degenerates into a restart-on-every-upgrade.

• Adding the annotation to an existing chart is a major bump (§2): runtime behavior changes — a config change now costs a restart. Name that cost in the PR (some workloads take minutes to come back).

• Secrets from OnePasswordItem cannot use this mechanism. Helm never sees their content — the 1Password operator fills the Secret in-cluster after rendering, so there is nothing to hash. A chart that mounts such a Secret as a file documents the limitation in its values.yaml where it cannot close the gap.

• What can be covered is the secret's op:// path, via a separately named checksum/secret-ref annotation over the rendered OnePasswordItem:

  checksum/secret-ref: {{ include (print $.Template.BasePath "/<chart>.secret.yaml") . | sha256sum }}
  

  Repointing secrets.<name>SecretRef at a different vault item then takes effect instead of silently leaving the old credentials in the running pod. The separate name is deliberate: checksum/config promises "the config changed", checksum/secret-ref only "the config source changed" — merging them into one annotation would overstate the weaker guarantee. Reference implementations: minecraft-server, homeassistant.

• operator.1password.io/auto-restart only works for Deployments — do not set it on a StatefulSet. Verified against onepassword-operator 1.12.0 (pkg/onepassword/secret_update_handler.go): restartWorkloadsWithUpdatedSecrets enumerates exactly one workload type, appsv1.DeploymentList, and getPodTemplate accepts only *appsv1.Deployment. The RBAC role grants statefulsets, and v1.11.0 generalized the restart code (restartWorkload, pod-template stamping via operator.1password.io/last-restarted), but the PR that would add StatefulSets is still open — so the annotation on a StatefulSet is a silent no-op. Setting it there is worse than not setting it: it advertises a guarantee that does not exist. Affected charts (matrix-synapse, samba, homeassistant) instead document the manual kubectl rollout restart statefulset <release>-<chart>-sfs. Re-check this when the operator version is bumped; a Deployment-based chart may set the annotation.

• If a Deployment-based chart ever does set it, mind the precedence: the annotation on the OnePasswordItem is copied onto the Kubernetes Secret and read first, so a false there overrides a true on the workload — the opposite of what the operator's usage guide suggests. Lookup order is Secret (from the OnePasswordItem) → workload → namespace → the operator-global AUTO_RESTART env var. The trigger is the 1Password item's version counter, not its content, so a re-save with identical values still restarts.

10. Environment variables

• Every workload container offers an additive env value block, appended to the env entries the chart always sets.
• Entries are rendered through tpl (so values may contain Helm templating) and support the value, secretKeyRef and configMapKeyRef forms (pattern: template-chart/templates/xxx.deployment.yaml).
• Additive means additive: an entry repeating a name the chart already sets does not replace it, and what the pair does depends on when it arrives. At install both entries reach the pod and the later one — the user's — wins. On an existing release the same entry is lost: Kubernetes merges env by name, the pair collapses to the chart's own value, and helm upgrade still reports success. Measured on urlaubsverwaltung (helm 3.19.0, Kubernetes 1.35): helm get manifest shows the variable twice while the live Deployment shows it once, carrying the chart's value. The failure mode is silence, so a chart whose NOTES.txt tells operators to override one of its own variables has to say that the override only takes at install time — and that a green upgrade proves nothing, the value belongs read back off the Deployment.

11. Scaling

• Every Deployment/StatefulSet has a replicas value (default 1, the values path per workload matches its section) that also accepts an explicit 0 for per-workload fine control.
• Every chart has a global scaleDown flag (default false): scaleDown: true takes precedence over all replicas values, renders every Deployment/StatefulSet with replicas: 0 and suspends CronJobs. It stops the app but does not uninstall it — PVCs, Secrets, Services and Ingress stay in place; setting it back to false brings the workloads back up.
• Implemented via a per-chart <chart>.replicas helper in _helpers.tpl (reference in template-chart); the helper uses an explicit nil check (kindIs "invalid") because Helm's default would swallow an explicit 0.

12. Values that must not lie (#68, #93, #99, #215)

Every chart ships a values.schema.json with additionalProperties: false on every chart-owned object level — not just the top one. The gap this closes is a key that looks like configuration and does nothing: the pilot (#68) found three of them in one chart, one of them nested three levels deep and quietly leaving a game world unpinned. Objects that are passed verbatim into the pod spec stay open (probes, securityContext.pod/.container, global, free-form annotation maps): Kubernetes owns their schema, and restricting them would only reject fields that do not exist yet. The schema adds to required(), it does not replace it.

Reference implementation: template-chart/values.schema.json and template-chart/templates/_helpers.tpl.

1. A value read outside its obvious template needs its own guard. Before putting an Ingress behind ingress.enabled, check whether anything else reads ingress.domain — in templates/ and in values.yaml, because env entries are rendered through tpl and hide such reads. If something does, that read needs its own required(); the gate then frees clusterIssuer but not domain. This happened in six charts, and matrix-synapse shows why it matters more than the count: its delegation nginx serves ingress.domain in the /.well-known/matrix/{server,client} endpoints through which federation finds the homeserver. Gating without the guard publishes

{"m.server": ":443"}     {"m.homeserver": {"base_url": "https://"}}

— rendered cleanly, pod green, federation broken. Check per chart and in both directions: in calibre-web-automated nothing outside the Ingress reads the domain, and there the gate frees both values.

2. Probes, security contexts and resources go through the null-safe helper, never behind an if. An override written without children is YAML null and erases the block: the container renders securityContext: null (unhardened, healthy, silent), a probe disappears, or resources loses its requests and computed limits. The defaultedDict helper defines the opposite semantics — an empty block means "chart defaults apply" — while an explicitly set value still wins, including false and 0 (hence the kindIs "invalid" check; default and mergeOverwrite both swallow zero values). Do not wrap these blocks in {{- if }}: a guard does not render a visible null, it removes the probe entirely, which is the same bug with no evidence left.

3. Do not hang liveness on an external dependency where a dependency-free path exists. zipline deliberately probes / for liveness and /api/healthcheck only for readiness and startup, so a database outage cannot restart the pod. Where no such path exists — outline returns 500 on / when the database is down — all three probes may share the endpoint, but the reason belongs in a comment on the helper, or the next reader will "fix" the inconsistency.

The other half of the same rule: readiness must hang on the dependency, and a separate path is not proof that it does. urlaubsverwaltung probed /actuator/health/liveness and /actuator/health/readiness for two years and still stayed 1/1 Ready through a total database outage (#218), because Spring Boot's readiness group contains readinessState alone — the split paths were right, the group content was empty of anything external. Whatever aggregates behind a probe path (Spring health groups, a /healthz a framework assembles for you) has to be read off the running endpoint, not off the path name; the chart names the members explicitly (MANAGEMENT_ENDPOINT_HEALTH_GROUP_READINESS_INCLUDE=readinessState,db) so the composition is in the template rather than in an upstream default.

4. A fallback reproduces this chart's defaults, not the repo standard. Five charts deviate from the hardening baseline on purpose. A "cleaned up" standard default is not tidying, it is an outage: calibre-web-automated must keep readOnlyRootFilesystem: false, because in read-only mode the image disables its PUID/PGID remapping and the runtime uid silently moves from 1000 to 911 — making existing volume data inaccessible. The same applies to non-standard values that look like mistakes: satisfactory keeps limitFactor: 2 (that is what holds the memory limit at the published 8Gi) and fsGroupChangePolicy: OnRootMismatch (which avoids a recursive chown of multi-GB game files on every start).

5. A probe default carries the probe's context, not just its timings. Two different symptoms, both from real charts: teamspeak-server addresses its TCP port by the name file-transfer because the voice service is UDP and cannot be probed — a default without that name leaves the workload with no working probe at all. patchmon sends a Host header because the server answers 403 to any request whose Host is neither loopback nor a CORS_ORIGIN host — a default without it means the pod never becomes Ready. Port names, Host headers and exec commands belong in the fallback; where the context is dynamic, pass the root context in and rebuild it (patchmon derives the header from ingress.domain).

6. A value that reads as the negation of the variable it feeds must actually be negated — and not cannot do it. satisfactory shipped game.seasonalEvents straight into the image's DISABLESEASONALEVENTS (#215): the default true switched the events off in every install for the chart's whole life, while the schema described the same key as "true means events are enabled". The fix is the loud one — rename the key so it says what it does (game.enableSeasonalEvents) rather than silently inverting the template under existing releases, because the old key then fails schema validation instead of quietly meaning the opposite. Two mechanics come with it: Go's not treats every non-empty string as true, so not "false" is false and the string form these schemas deliberately accept flips the wrong way — compare explicitly (eq (lower (printf "%v" $v)) "true") instead. And a value that cannot be read as either boolean belongs in a fail, not in an implicit branch: enableSeasonalEvents: "yes" must abort the render, not be quietly filed under "off". When such a rename lands, the new default is the one that reproduces what the chart already rendered; changing the meaning and the behaviour in the same release turns the loud fix back into a silent one.

Two things about the mechanics that are easy to lose:

• null reaches the schema in one case and not the other. For a key with a chart default, Helm's coalescing treats the null as a deletion and removes it before schema validation — the schema never sees it, and only the helper can catch it. For a key without a default (e.g. resources.limits), there is nothing to delete, the null survives into validation, and a strict "type": "object" aborts the render. That is why the helper and the widened ["object", "null"] types are both needed: each covers a case the other cannot. Everything else stays strictly typed.
• Validate every schema against the real values, not only against chart defaults. Defaults are valid by construction, so they prove nothing. Render each chart against its bundle in cluster-config/fleet-cd/ and against helm get values — the two differ more often than expected (four of ten bundles in one wave, always with the repo file being the worse one). This step caught a schema of mine that would have broken three live paperless releases, because all three write tikaGotenberg.enabled as the string "true" and the first draft demanded a boolean. Result per chart is a list of rejected keys, which is the cluster side's work order before the version is pulled up.

13. Everything else

• icon: is mandatory in every Chart.yaml. Documented exception — freesailarr, the only chart without one: the rule everywhere else is "the icon is this chart's one upstream's logo", and a chart bundling nine independently versioned projects has no such upstream — picking one of the nine would imply a "main app" the stack deliberately does not have. That is the whole criterion, and it applies to no other chart in the repo: a single-upstream chart without an icon is a missing icon, not an exception. The omission costs an INFO line in helm lint --strict (icon is recommended), which still exits 0.
• helm lint --strict must pass without findings.
• Every chart ships a templates/NOTES.txt (#43), template-chart included — so this is a requirement for a new chart, not a nice-to-have it can defer. No list of names here on purpose: a count goes stale the moment the next chart lands, which is exactly how the previous wording came to claim a number it never matched. Reference implementation: template-chart/templates/NOTES.txt, a placeholder-carrying template rather than finished prose, so a new chart adapts it instead of starting from an empty file. The bar it sets: print what an operator would otherwise have to look up in the templates (the rendered access URL, which fields the 1Password item must carry, the options actually active in this release, and the chart's known traps), conditional on the values really set. A NOTES.txt that only repeats the values is skimmed once and never read again. No real domain anywhere — the URL renders from ingress.domain, and where an example is unavoidable it is example.com. A NOTES.txt renders no Kubernetes object, so writing or reworking one is purely additive: a minor bump.
• CI: every installable chart has fixtures under ci/<chart>/ (test-values.yaml, optionally fixtures.yaml/fixtures.env.yaml/settings.env) or a justified entry in ci/excluded-charts.txt — the install-test fails if both are missing.

14. Chart dependencies

Until ytdlp-web-player (#214) this section read "charts have no dependencies (charts/ directories are empty)". That rule is gone, replaced by a bar rather than a ban — a dependency is admissible, not free, and the reason it stopped being a ban is worth keeping: the chart needed an oauth2-proxy in the data path in front of an application that ships no authentication at all, and proxy and app are only useful wired to each other.

When a dependency earns its place. All three, not two of three:

1. The dependent piece would otherwise be a second Helm release that only exists to serve this one, with the wiring between them living in neither chart.
2. Upstream is the right owner of it. We consume their chart as it comes: we do not patch it, do not re-harden it, do not re-implement its values. Where their defaults fall short of the guidelines above, that is documented in our values.yaml, not fixed by us — and a values-level fix stays available to whoever installs it.
3. It is optional and off by default (condition: in Chart.yaml), so the chart is complete without it and a default install renders none of its objects.

What it costs, all of it visible before the next one is added:

• The subchart is invisible to everything downstream. Its version is inside our packaged .tgz, so anything that watches Helm release versions — Fleet's fleet.yaml in cluster-config included — sees only our chart version. A new upstream release, security fix included, reaches a cluster only when we publish a new version of the outer chart. Nothing reports the gap. Renovate's built-in helmv3 manager opens the PR (no customManagers entry needed — the repository URL and version sit together in one file) and ci/renovate-bump-chart.sh bumps the chart patch that ships it; that chain is the entire safety net. State this in a comment at the pinned version, not only in a review.
• Every pipeline that touches the chart needs a network fetch first. helm lint, helm package, helm template and helm install all exit 1 while a declared dependency is missing from charts/, so ci/helm-dependencies.sh runs before each of them (see CI/CD above). One of those call sites is the resource-quantity render test, which runs over every chart on every PR — a dependency-carrying chart can therefore turn a third-party Helm repository's bad day into a red pipeline on a PR that touched nothing related.
• charts/*.tgz and Chart.lock are not committed (.gitignore says why): the archive is a third-party binary nobody reviews in a diff, and a committed lock would arrive stale because Renovate rewrites Chart.yaml and cannot regenerate it — which is also why the pipelines run helm dependency update and not helm dependency build.
• The repo's own mechanisms stop at the subchart boundary. checksum/config, the 1Password auto-restart annotation and the scaleDown flag reach our templates only. A chart that renders a OnePasswordItem for its subchart documents the manual kubectl rollout restart that replaces the missing restart-on-change.

Two implementation notes that cost time otherwise: a values key containing a dash is unreachable as .Values.oauth2-proxy (that parses as a subtraction) and needs index .Values "oauth2-proxy", while condition: in Chart.yaml splits on dots only and needs no escaping. And inside a subchart .Chart.Name is the subchart's name — a value templated into it (config.configFile in this case) must spell the parent chart out literally; only .Release.Name is shared.

Charts that need no dependency still have none, and charts/ stays empty for all of them. template-chart remains dependency-free: the scaffold should not carry a dependencies: block a new chart has to remember to delete.