There are now many charts (packages) for Helm, the Kubernetes package manager. These charts are provided by companies, like Bitnami (part of VMware), open source projects, and individuals. These days, the charts are hosted in a distributed manner where these different people and groups can host them on their own. To aide in discovering these distributed charts, there are now multiple services you can use.

This post is going to look at four of them in reverse chronological order from the time of their creation.

jFrog ChartCenter

jFrog recently launched ChartCenter as a place to discover charts. Not only can you search for charts but you can see dependencies such as the container images they use and some security advisories.

One thing to note is that you add ChartCenter as your repository rather than the individual repositories (e.g., Bitnami). This is likely how they are getting the download information.

Artifact Hub

Artifact Hub is a another discovery service. In addition to charts, some other Kubernetes based artifacts can be searched for.

Notifications and webhooks are a unique feature of Artifact Hub. They can be used to notify you of new releases and even setup automation based on them.

Artifact Hub is a CNCF Sandbox project.

Helm Hub

The Helm Hub is a search service provided by the Helm project. It provides a simple search service of the distributed Helm repositories.

In Helm v3, you can search the Helm Hub using the helm search hub command.

KubeApps Hub

KubeApps is the original search service for Helm charts. It has been around for years. While it started with Helm charts, you can now search for OLM based operators as well.