The helm-docs tool generates automatic documentation from helm charts into a markdown file. The resulting file contains metadata about the chart and a table with all of your charts' values, their defaults, and an optional description parsed from comments.

The markdown generation is entirely gotemplate driven. The tool parses metadata from charts and generates a number of sub-templates that can be referenced in a template file (by default README.md.gotmpl). If no template file is provided, the tool has a default internal template that will generate a reasonably formatted README.

helm-docs can be installed using homebrew:

brew install norwoodj/tap/helm-docs

This will download and install the latest release of the tool.

To build from source in this repository:

cd cmd/helm-docs
go build

To run and generate documentation into READMEs for all helm charts within or recursively contained by a directory:

helm-docs
# OR
helm-docs --dry-run # prints generated documentation to stdout rather than modifying READMEs

The tool searches recursively through subdirectories of the current directory for Chart.yaml files and generates documentation for every chart that it finds.

The templates generated by the tool are shown below, and can be included in your README.md.gotmpl file like so:

{{ template "template-name" . }}

For an example of how these various templates can be used in a README.md.gotmpl file to generate a reasonable markdown file, look at the charts in example-charts.

If there is no README.md.gotmpl (or other specified gotmpl file) present, the default template is used to generate the README. That template looks like so:

{{ template "chart.header" . }}
{{ template "chart.description" . }}

{{ template "chart.versionLine" . }}

{{ template "chart.sourceLinkLine" . }}

{{ template "chart.requirementsSection" . }}

{{ template "chart.valuesSection" . }}

The tool includes the sprig templating library, so those functions can be used in the templates you supply.

helm-docs supports a .helmdocsignore file, exactly like a .gitignore file in which one can specify directories to ignore when searching for charts. Directories specified need not be charts themselves, so parent directories containing potentially many charts can be ignored and none of the charts underneath them will be processed. You may also directly reference the Chart.yaml file for a chart to skip processing for it.

This tool can parse descriptions and defaults of values from values.yaml files. The defaults are pulled directly from the yaml in the file. Descriptions can be added for parameters by specifying the full path of the value and a particular comment format. I invite you to check out the example-charts to see how this is done in practice. In order to add a description for a parameter you need only put a comment somewhere in the file of the format:

controller:
  publishService:
    # controller.publishService.enabled -- Whether to expose the ingress controller to the public world
    enabled: false

  # controller.replicas -- Number of nginx-ingress pods to load balance between
  replicas: 2

The following rules are used to determine which values will be added to the values table in the README:

• By default, only leaf nodes, that is, fields of type int, string, float, bool, empty lists, and empty maps are added as rows in the values table. These fields will be added even if they do not have a description comment
• Lists and maps which contain elements will not be added as rows in the values table unless they have a description comment which refers to them
• Adding a description comment for a non-empty list or map in this way makes it so that leaf nodes underneath the described field will not be automatically added to the values table. In order to document both a non-empty list/map and a leaf node within that field, description comments must be added for both

e.g. In this case, both controller.livenessProbe and controller.livenessProbe.httpGet.path will be added as rows in the values table, but controller.livenessProbe.httpGet.port will not

controller:
  # controller.livenessProbe -- Configure the healthcheck for the ingress controller
  livenessProbe:
    httpGet:
      # controller.livenessProbe.httpGet.path -- This is the liveness check endpoint
      path: /healthz
      port: http

Results in:

If we remove the comment for controller.livenessProbe however, both leaf nodes controller.livenessProbe.httpGet.path and controller.livenessProbe.httpGet.port will be added to the table, with our without description comments:

controller:
  livenessProbe:
    httpGet:
      # controller.livenessProbe.httpGet.path -- This is the liveness check endpoint
      path: /healthz
      port: http

Results in:

If you would like to define a key for a value, but leave the default empty, you can still specify a description for it as well as a type. Like so:

controller:
  # controller.replicas -- (int) Number of nginx-ingress pods to load balance between
  replicas:

This could be useful when wanting to enforce user-defined values for the chart, where there are no sensible defaults.

If a key name contains any "." or " " characters, that section of the path must be quoted in description comments e.g.

service:
  annotations:
    # service.annotations."external-dns.alpha.kubernetes.io/hostname" -- Hostname to be assigned to the ELB for the service
    external-dns.alpha.kubernetes.io/hostname: stupidchess.jmn23.com

configMap:
  # configMap."not real config param" -- A completely fake config parameter for a useful example
  not real config param: value

If you want to automatically generate README.md files with a pre-commit hook, make sure you install the pre-commit binary, and add a .pre-commit-config.yaml file to your project. Then run:

pre-commit install
pre-commit install-hooks

Future changes to your charts requirements.yaml, values.yaml, or Chart.yaml files will cause an update to documentation when you commit.