Local dependencies not working in release definition

[marianogg9]

Hi all.
I am facing an issue with local dependencies declaration part of a release, as follows:

releases:
- name: foo_rel
   namespace: foo_ns
   chart: foo_example
   dependencies:
   - name: dep_chart
      repository: file://../path/to/dep_chart_dir
      version: 1.0.1

The above will throw this error when trying to render/diff templates:

in helmfile.d/helmfile.yaml: failed to read helmfile.yaml: reading document at index 1: yaml: unmarshal errors:
  line 12: field name not found in type state.Dependency
  line 13: field repository not found in type state.Dependency
exit status 1

But if declared in Charts.yaml within foo_example directory, it works just fine and loads/renders dep_chart along with foo_example as expected.

dependencies:
- name: dep_chart
   repository: file://../path/to/dep_chart_dir
   version: 1.0.1

Thank you.

[mumoshu]

@marianogg9 Hey! Please see helmfile/chartify@c9b4508 and #1765.

I was pretty confused initially but I managed to make it work.

First of all, Helmfile's dependencies syntax is a bit different from Helm Chart.yaml's. In helmfile's, the only available fields are:

• alias (optional)
• chart (required)
• version (optional)

Until now chart only supported the REMOTE_REPO/CHART where REMOTE_REPO must be defined in repositories section of your helmfiel.yaml like:

repositories:
- name: REMOTE_REPO
  url: https://example.com/charts

Neither repositories[].url nor releases[].dependencies[].chart had support for local file URLs(with a file:// scheme)

#1765 enhanced the latter, repositories[].dependencies[].chart to just accept the path to local chart.

So,

releases:
- name: foo
  chart: ./path/to/foo
  dependencies:
  - chart: ./path/to/bar

results in Helmfile internally generating Chart.yaml containing:

dependencies:
- alias: bar
  name: bar
  repo: file:///abs/path/to/bar

@marianogg9 WDYT? Does this resolve your issue?

[marianogg9]

Thank you @mumoshu, that looks good! If it accepts a local FS path for a chart, then it is fixed.

[mumoshu]

@marianogg9 Thanks for confirming! #1765 has been merged with a brand new documentation about adding ad-hoc dendendencies https://github.com/roboll/helmfile/blob/master/docs/advanced-features.md#adding-dependencies-without-forking-the-chart

[eigood]

This is still an issue, as the dependencies need a proper version constraint, but with a local kustomization chart, that doesn't work.

[arielweinberger]

Confirming this does not work

releases:
- name: aws-load-balancer-controller
  chart: eks/aws-load-balancer-controller
  version: 1.4.3
  namespace: kube-system
  dependencies:
  - chart: ./crds
  values:
  - values.yaml.gotmpl

Getting the following error:

in ./helmfile.yaml: in .helmfiles[0]: in releases/aws-load-balancer-controller/helmfile.yaml: [exit status 1

COMMAND:
  helm dependency up /var/folders/9_/hb_cskt16clgqf0380d96shw0000gn/T/chartify978043108/kube-system/aws-load-balancer-controller/aws-load-balancer-controller

OUTPUT:
  Error: dependency "crds" has an invalid version/constraint format: improper constraint: 

[yxxhero]

@arielweinberger #2148

[Falven]

Why is there no namespace field for dependencies 😬 it's the whole reason I started using helmfile in the first place, so that I could deploy subcharts to different namespaces.