Dump Manifests for all Revisions for a Helm Release

Being able to diagnose what changed in a Helm chart is an important requirement. One of the tools that we can use to see what exactly Helm is deploying to our Kubernetes cluster is by running helm get manifest. You can pass in the revision to see what historical manifests looked like (a good way to see exactly what has changed). But this can be a tedious and laborious task, so I wrote a quick shell script to pull all of the manifests for the entire history of a release.

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#!/bin/bash

NAMESPACE="$1"
RELEASE="$2"
TMP_DIR=$(mktemp -d)

if [[ -z "$NAMESPACE" || -z "$RELEASE" ]]; then
    echo "Missing parameters"
    echo "./helm-manifest-dump.sh <namespace> <release>"
    exit 1
fi

for REVISION in $(helm history -n "$NAMESPACE" "$RELEASE" | tail -n +2 | awk '{print $1}'); do
    helm get manifest \
		-n "$NAMESPACE" \
        --revision "$REVISION" \
        "$RELEASE" > "$TMP_DIR/${RELEASE}_${REVISION}"
done

echo "Manifests located in '$TMP_DIR'"

Just run ./helm-manifest-dump.sh <namespace> <release>. This dumps all manifests to the temporary output directory, allowing you to grep, cat, diff, or do whatever you want to analyze them.

This small script can be found on GitHub.

Enjoy!