Chart Preview

I’m a software engineer who accidentally became my team’s Kubernetes person — and eventually the bottleneck for every Helm chart PR. PRs would sit for weeks or months, not because the changes were bad, but because testing them meant manually spinning up a cluster, deploying the chart, and running through test scenarios. Since I was the only one who could reliably set those environments up, everything waited on me. I kept thinking: what if reviewers could just click a link and see the PR deployed? That idea became Chart Preview. Chart Preview creates a live, ephemeral Kubernetes environment for every PR that deploys via Helm. You get a unique preview URL, PR status checks, and automatic cleanup when the PR closes — without having to manage clusters, ingress, or TLS yourself. I built it to be Helm-native. A lot of preview tools focus on containers, but Helm brings its own challenges: chart dependencies, layered values, and opinionated structures. I wanted something that understood Helm workflows directly instead of trying to bend a container preview model to fit. I’ve been validating this using real charts like Grafana, podinfo, and WordPress, and now I’m trying to understand if this pain resonates with other teams. I’d love your feedback: – Does this solve a real problem for your team, or is shared staging “good enough”? – What would stop you from using something like this? – Anything you’d expect from a Helm preview workflow that’s missing? Happy to answer questions or dig into the implementation.