CKAD — Managing Helm Releases

Listing and Inspecting Releases

Once you’ve installed charts, you need to manage the running releases.

# List installed releases
helm list
helm list -n production
helm list --all-namespaces

# Check release status
helm status my-nginx

# Get the values used for a release
helm get values my-nginx

# Get all generated manifests
helm get manifest my-nginx

Upgrading Releases

When you need to change configuration or update to a new chart version:

# Upgrade with new values
helm upgrade my-nginx bitnami/nginx --set replicaCount=5

# Upgrade with a values file
helm upgrade my-nginx bitnami/nginx -f updated-values.yaml

# Install if not exists, upgrade if exists
helm upgrade --install my-nginx bitnami/nginx --set replicaCount=3

helm upgrade --install is a common pattern — it creates the release if it doesn’t exist, or upgrades it if it does. Very useful in CI/CD pipelines.

Rolling Back

Every upgrade creates a new revision. You can roll back to any previous revision:

# View release history
helm history my-nginx
# Expected:
# REVISION    STATUS      DESCRIPTION
# 1           superseded  Install complete
# 2           deployed    Upgrade complete

# Roll back to previous revision
helm rollback my-nginx 1

# Verify
helm status my-nginx

Key point: helm rollback <release> <revision> — the revision number comes from helm history.

Uninstalling Releases

# Uninstall a release
helm uninstall my-nginx

# Uninstall but keep history (allows future rollback)
helm uninstall my-nginx --keep-history

Quick Reference

Task	Command
List releases	helm list
Release status	helm status <release>
Release values	helm get values <release>
Release manifests	helm get manifest <release>
Upgrade	helm upgrade <release> <chart> [flags]
Upgrade or install	helm upgrade --install <release> <chart>
View history	helm history <release>
Roll back	helm rollback <release> <revision>
Uninstall	helm uninstall <release>

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Next: Kustomize Basics