Helm deployment alternative after Bitnami Chart deprecation

[tsaarni]

One of the deployment options in the documentation currently relies on the Bitnami Helm chart. The Bitnami Charts project will stop receiving updates after August 28, 2025.

After that date, the Contour Helm chart will no longer be maintained through Bitnami, and an alternative approach for Helm-based deployments will be needed. This concern has already been raised in the community Slack (link, link).

This issue is intended to discuss possible alternatives and a way forward.

Tasks to complete before calling this done:

• PR to the governance docs describing the new repo and a new community role for "helm chart maintainer"
• solicit contributors to populate a new github team for the "helm chart maintainer" role
• set up new github team and update maintainers docs
• create new helm chart repo
• set up user permissions/codeowners in the new chart repo
• migrate bitnami helm chart, including relevant git history
• set up CI actions for chart release, etc.

[tsaarni]

Cc @deepy

[deepy]

I'm going to attempt to fork the bitnami chart this weekend, going about it this way:

1. Strip all git history outside of the common subchart and the contour chart to retain only the relevant history
2. Update the contour chart to use the forked common subchart
3. Test the result in my own cluster to verify success
4. EDIT: Update the README and make sure I've not accidentally removed license hints from anywhere

If that works then the end result should be a repository that uses GitHub actions to build the chart and GitHub pages to serve it, which can then be transferred, cloned, or forked into the organization

[deepy]

I'd be happy to help with the maintenance of the chart going forward as well, but while I know helm pretty well I don't know envoy at all :-)

[tsaarni]

I'd be happy to help with the maintenance of the chart going forward as well, but while I know helm pretty well I don't know envoy at all :-)

Sounds fantastic! I can help with Contour and Envoy but don't know much about Helm 😂

[tsaarni]

GitHub pages to serve it

Since helm supports oci:// I've seen people using github packages / github container registry to host Helm charts. We already host Contour image there and we could add Helm chart as well. This is some random example I found with a quick google search.

[deepy]

The flux community chart looks like it has an action that already handles everything, using github pages for the index and OCI for the charts 🎉
https://github.com/fluxcd-community/helm-charts/blob/d328958/.github/workflows/release.yml

[sunjayBhatia]

That sounds like a great plan @deepy, a separate repo in the projectcontour org sounds like a great way to keep this going and gives us a nice opportunity to expand community contribution and membership for those that want to continue to use the helm chart

Some related tasks we should do:

• PR to the governance docs describing the new repo and a new community role for "helm chart maintainer"
• solicit contributors to populate a new github team for the "helm chart maintainer" role
• set up new github team and update maintainers docs
• set up user permissions/codeowners in the new chart repo

I'll add these as checklist items in this issue so we can use it as a tracking base

[sunjayBhatia]

For completeness, it sounds like we have agreement on moving forward with a new repo in this github org which has advantages over migrating the chart to the main contour repo. While it does require us to set up new CI machinery, permissions, etc. it gives us the opportunity to provide more maintainer roles specific to the helm chart

[deepy]

I've got the skeleton in place, but haven't done any verification yet and it's incorrectly publishing the chart both to releases and to packages
And I've moved the functions that are in use from the common chart to _common.tpl and removed the dependency

But now I need to charge my laptop and prepare dinner
I'm experimenting in https://github.com/deepy/contour-chart (and I recommend nobody use it yet)

[deepy]

Probably not very surprising but bitnami's envoy and contour images don't add anything exciting and have the respective binary as entrypoint so everything worked fine with replacing them

Untangling all the bitnami-isms from the chart is probably going to take a while, but I've put the ones that need immediate removal into _common_remove.tpl

So initial tests look good - a basic setup worked fine with the new chart and usual images
Tomorrow I'll start removing those functions and replacing the images, with the exception of the nginx-based defaultBackend - I need to take a closer look at it, but my initial take is that I want to remove it and the 96 additional settings it adds to values.yaml

[deepy]

Images have been replaced and the warnings/errors from using non-bitnami images have been removed, I think leaving the nginx-based defaultBackend for now (and maybe deprecating it later) is probably fine or at least not something that needs to be tackled in the initial iteration

So with that in mind, that marks the completion of the first step: forking the chart and getting it to publish to github instead
It still leaves the fun bits like updating all metadata, the documentation, and making the new READMEs
(And the final step of moving the chart sources in the repository from bitnami/contour to charts/contour)

I can continue working on that in the previously mentioned repository and/or start moving the repository to its permanent home

[tsaarni]

Images have been replaced and the warnings/errors from using non-bitnami images have been removed, I think leaving the nginx-based defaultBackend for now (and maybe deprecating it later) is probably fine or at least not something that needs to be tackled in the initial iteration

I must admit I have not looked into the Bitnami chart enough to understand the purpose of defaultBackend, but I'm quite certain we don't want to ship with NGINX bundled. That said, I think it should be removed even from initial release, rather than keeping it around for later deprecation.

What should we call the new repo, helm-charts?

[deepy]

I haven't used default backend functionality at all, so not the best person to make a call, but I'd be happy to remove it from the chart. Even if it's disabled by default it's a lot of lines

As for repository helm-charts sounds good, though I think most of the ones I see are called just chart or charts