Helm Chart Generator

Helm Chart Generator

Generate a Helm chart that a DevOps team would accept — or that a solo developer can ship directly. Production defaults baked in; per-environment overrides via values files.

When to use

• "Deploy this to Kubernetes/EKS" / "create a Helm chart"
• "Write k8s manifests" / "set up dev/staging/prod values"

Chart layout

<service>/
├── Chart.yaml
├── values.yaml                 # defaults
├── values-staging.yaml         # overrides
├── values-prod.yaml            # overrides
└── templates/
    ├── deployment.yaml
    ├── service.yaml
    ├── ingress.yaml
    ├── hpa.yaml
    ├── configmap.yaml
    └── _helpers.tpl

Production defaults (apply these)

• Probes: livenessProbe → /healthz, readinessProbe → /readyz with sensible delays/timeouts.
• Resources: set requests and limits for cpu/memory (don't ship without requests — it breaks scheduling/HPA).
• Rolling updates: maxUnavailable: 0, maxSurge: 1 for zero-downtime; set minReadySeconds.
• Security context: runAsNonRoot: true, drop all capabilities, read-only root FS where possible.
• Config: non-secret config via ConfigMap; secrets via existing Secret refs / external-secrets — never inline secret values in the chart.
• HPA: optional autoscaler on CPU/custom metrics with min/max replicas.
• Labels: standard app.kubernetes.io/* labels via _helpers.tpl.
• Image: repository + tag (default to chart appVersion); pullPolicy: IfNotPresent.

values.yaml shape (excerpt)

image: { repository: ghcr.io/org/service, tag: "", pullPolicy: IfNotPresent }
replicaCount: 2
resources:
  requests: { cpu: 100m, memory: 128Mi }
  limits:   { cpu: 500m, memory: 512Mi }
probes:
  liveness:  { path: /healthz, initialDelaySeconds: 10 }
  readiness: { path: /readyz,  initialDelaySeconds: 5 }
ingress: { enabled: false, host: "", tls: false }
autoscaling: { enabled: false, minReplicas: 2, maxReplicas: 6, targetCPUUtilizationPercentage: 70 }

Steps

1. Ask for service name, port, image repo, and whether it needs Ingress/HPA/secrets.
2. Generate the chart with the defaults above and three values files (default/staging/prod).
3. Validate with helm lint and helm template mentally; include README with helm upgrade --install <name> ./<chart> -f values-prod.yaml.

Pairs with dockerfile-optimizer and ci-pipeline-generator for an end-to-end ship path.