nixhelm
January 8, 2026 ยท View on GitHub
This is a collection of helm charts in a nix-digestible format.
Supported chart repositories
Nixhelm supports both traditional HTTP helm chart repositories and OCI-compliant registries:
- HTTP/HTTPS repositories (ChartMuseum, traditional Helm repos)
- OCI registries (GitHub Container Registry, Docker Hub, Harbor, etc.)
If your chart is hosted in a git repo, remember that you can fetch it as a flake
input and pass to buildHelmChart directly.
Outputs
The flake has the following outputs:
chartsMetadata.${repo}.${chart} contains the metadata about a specific chart.
chartsDerivations.${system}.${repo}.${chart} contains the derivations producing
the charts.
charts { pkgs = ... }.${repo}.${chart} a shortcut for the above that doesn't
depend on the nixpkgs input and allows to specify any nixpkgs.
The charts are updated nightly.
Usage
nix build .#chartsDerivations.x86_64-linux."argoproj"."argo-cd"
Will download the Argo CD helm chart to result/.
To build a chart, you should use the kube generators from
github:farcaller/nix-kube-generators,
and just pass your chart to the buildCharts function. So for example to render
the Argo CD chart:
argo = (kubelib.buildHelmChart {
name = "argo";
chart = (nixhelm.charts { inherit pkgs; }).argoproj.argo-cd;
namespace = "argo";
});
If you want to use this setup within Argo CD, check out cake.
Using the cache
This repository and all the charts within are publicly cached at cachix as
nixhelm. Here's how you can quickly
enable it in your nix installation:
Without flakes
nix-env -iA cachix -f https://cachix.org/api/v1/install
With flakes
nix profile install nixpkgs#cachix
Then enable the cache
cachix use nixhelm
Alternatively, manually add this to /etc/nix/nix.conf:
substituters = https://cache.nixos.org https://nixhelm.cachix.org
trusted-public-keys = cache.nixos.org-1:6NCHdD59X431o0gWypbMrAURkbJ16ZPMQFGspcDShjY= nixhelm.cachix.org-1:esqauAsR4opRF0UsGrA6H3gD21OrzMnBBYvJXeddjtY=
Adding new charts
Clone the repository and run the following command from within it:
nix run .#helmupdater -- init $REPO $REPO_NAME/$CHART_NAME --commit
Where REPO is the URL to the chart repository, REPO_NAME is the short name for the
repository and the CHART_NAME is the name of the chart in the repository.
HTTP Repository Example
If you want to add prometheus:
nix run .#helmupdater -- init "https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts" prometheus-community/prometheus --commit
OCI Registry Example
For charts hosted in OCI registries, use the oci:// scheme:
nix run .#helmupdater -- init "oci://ghcr.io/myorg/charts" myorg/nginx --commit
The command will create the properly formatted commit that you can then submit as a pull request to the repo.
License
Apache-2.0