helm search: Usage, Options & Common CI Errors

Find charts - in your added repos or across Artifact Hub.

helm search locates charts: search repo queries your locally added repositories' cached indexes, while search hub queries Artifact Hub across many public repos. It is how you discover charts and their available versions.

What it does

helm search repo TERM matches against the cached indexes of repos you have added (so it is offline-fast but only as fresh as your last repo update). --versions lists every version, not just the latest; --version with a constraint filters. helm search hub TERM queries Artifact Hub's API over the network for charts you have not added.

Common usage

Terminal

helm search repo nginx
helm search repo bitnami/nginx --versions
helm search repo nginx --version ">=15.0.0"
helm search hub wordpress

Common errors in CI

search repo finding nothing usually is not an error message but an empty result: the repo was never added on this runner, or the index is stale (a new chart version is missing). Run helm repo add and helm repo update first. search hub needs network access to Artifact Hub; in air-gapped CI it simply fails to reach the API. Remember the two are different scopes: search hub will find a chart you have not added, but you still must helm repo add its repository before you can install it.

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