Checking the chart

Most of the testing of your chart will have to be done by deploying it in a test Kubernetes environment. See Add a new application to Phalanx for more details about how to do that. However, you can check the chart for basic syntax and some errors in Helm templating before deploying it.

To check your chart, run:

phalanx application lint <application>

Replace <application> with the name of your new application. Multiple applications may be listed to lint all of them.

This will run helm lint on the chart with the appropriate values files and injected settings for each environment for which it has a configuration and report any errors. helm lint does not check resources against their schemas, alas, but it will at least diagnose YAML and Helm templating syntax errors.

You can limit the linting to a specific environment by specifying an environment with the --environment (or -e or --env) flag.

helm lint also cannot see problems in the rendered resources themselves. For example, two environment variables with the same name in one container is valid YAML and is accepted by Kubernetes, but Argo CD will refuse to sync the resource. To catch problems like this, phalanx application lint also expands the chart with helm template for each environment and checks the resulting Kubernetes resources with kube-linter, which must therefore be installed (see Install kube-linter). The checks that are run are listed in .kube-linter.yaml at the top level of the Phalanx repository.

GitHub Actions runs this lint check for every application and environment, not only the ones changed by a PR, so a PR cannot be merged while any chart in the repository fails it.

You can also ask for the fully-expanded Kubernetes resources that would be installed in the cluster when the chart is installed. Do this with:

phalanx application template <application> <environment>

Replace <application> with the name of your application and <environment> with the name of the environment for which you want to generate its resources. This will print to standard output the expanded YAML Kubernetes resources that would be created in the cluster by this chart.