I’m a software engineer who accidentally became my team’s Kubernetes person — and eventually the bottleneck for every Helm chart PR.
I built Chart Preview so reviewers could see Helm chart changes running without waiting on me.
A few years ago, my team needed to implement HA for an existing product, which meant deploying on Kubernetes and OpenShift. I spent months learning Kubernetes, Helm, and the surrounding ecosystem. After that, Kubernetes largely became “my thing” on the team.
We later published public Helm charts for the product, and customers started submitting PRs. Those PRs would often sit for months — not because the changes were bad, but because testing them meant manually spinning up a Kubernetes cluster, deploying the chart with the proposed changes, running through test scenarios, and coordinating verification with product and QA. Since I was the only one who could reliably set up those environments, everything waited on me.
I kept thinking: what if the PR itself showed the changes working? What if reviewers could just click a link and see it deployed?
That idea became Chart Preview.
Chart Preview deploys your Helm chart to a real Kubernetes cluster when you open a PR, provides a unique preview URL for that PR, and cleans everything up automatically when the PR closes.
I started by solving a problem I was personally hitting, rather than surveying the whole market upfront. As I built more of it, I looked at existing preview tools and noticed that while there are solid solutions for previewing container-based applications, Helm-specific workflows introduce different challenges — chart dependencies, layered values files, and opinionated chart structures. That pushed me to focus Chart Preview on being Helm-native first, rather than adapting a container preview workflow to fit Helm.
Under the hood, it’s built in Go using the Helm v3 SDK. The architecture is an API server with workers pulling jobs from a PostgreSQL queue — no Kubernetes operator, just services talking directly to the Kubernetes API. Each preview runs in its own namespace with deny-all NetworkPolicies, ResourceQuotas, and LimitRanges. GitHub integration is done via a GitHub App for check runs and webhooks, with GitLab supported via the REST API.
There were a few interesting challenges along the way. Injecting preview hostnames into Ingress resources without corrupting manifests took several iterations. Helm uninstall doesn’t always clean everything up, so deleting the entire namespace turned out to be the safest fallback. Handling rapid pushes to the same PR required build numbering so the latest push always wins. And while the Helm SDK is powerful, it’s under-documented — I spent a lot of time reading Helm’s source code.
I’ve been building and testing this for a few months using real charts like Grafana, podinfo, and WordPress to validate the workflow. It’s early, but it works, and now I’m trying to understand whether other teams have the same pain point I did.
You can try it by installing the GitHub App here: https://github.com/apps/chart-preview
I’d love feedback on a few things:
Does this solve a real problem for your team, or is shared staging “good enough”?
What’s missing that would make you actually use it?
Are there Helm charts this wouldn’t work for? (Cluster-scoped resources are intentionally blocked.)
Happy to answer questions about the implementation.
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46337764
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