helm history: Usage, Options & Common CI Errors

See every revision of a release and what happened to it.

helm history shows the revision log for a release - each upgrade, rollback, and its outcome. You read it to pick a safe rollback target and to understand how a release reached its current state.

What it does

helm history NAME lists revisions with their revision number, updated time, status (deployed, superseded, failed), chart, app version, and description. The newest deployed revision is the live one; superseded revisions are previous deployed states you can roll back to. --max limits the rows shown.

Common usage

Terminal

helm history web
helm history web -n prod --max 20
helm history web -o json
helm rollback web 5         # roll back to a revision history showed

Common errors in CI

History is bounded: helm upgrade keeps at most --history-max revisions (default 10), so the revision you want to roll back to may already be pruned - history only ever shows what survives. A release whose history is all failed revisions has no good rollback target ("has no deployed releases"); you must fix forward with upgrade --install. "Error: release: not found" means the name/namespace is wrong, since history needs an existing release to report on.

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