CleanStart Helm Charts Guide

Last updated: April 2026

Overview

CleanStart automatically generates production-ready Helm charts during image builds. Every chart includes hardened security contexts, auto-detected workload types, and all the Kubernetes resources needed for deployment. You can also use CleanStart images as drop-in replacements within existing Bitnami Helm charts via values overlays.

Generating a Helm Chart

Add the --generate-helm flag when building an image:

cleanimg build redis.cleanimg.yaml \  --generate-helm \  -o output/

This produces a complete chart at output/redis/helm/redis/ containing:

redis/  Chart.yaml          # Metadata, version, maintainer  values.yaml         # Parameterized defaults  .helmignore         # Artifact exclusions  NOTES.txt           # Post-install instructions  templates/    _helpers.tpl      # Template helper functions    workload.yaml     # Deployment or StatefulSet    service.yaml      # ClusterIP service    headless-service.yaml    serviceaccount.yaml    networkpolicy.yaml    hpa.yaml          # Horizontal pod autoscaler    pdb.yaml          # Pod disruption budget    ingress.yaml

You can also generate raw Kubernetes manifests (without Helm templating) using --generate-k8s.

Deploying a Generated Chart

helm install redis output/redis/helm/redis/ \  --set image.repository=gcr.io/clean-image-build/redis \  --set image.tag=8.2.2-r0 \  --set replicaCount=3

Common values.yaml Overrides

image:  repository: gcr.io/clean-image-build/redis  tag: "8.2.2-r0"  pullPolicy: IfNotPresent replicaCount: 3 resources:  requests:    cpu: 100m    memory: 128Mi  limits:    cpu: 500m    memory: 512Mi persistence:  enabled: true  size: 10Gi

Workload Type Auto-Detection

The chart generator automatically chooses between a Deployment and a StatefulSet based on the image's filesystem analysis. If the spec declares writable paths under known persistence directories (/data, /db, /pgdata, /mysql, /postgres, /mongodb, /kafka, /redis), a StatefulSet with PersistentVolumeClaims is generated. Otherwise, a stateless Deployment is used.

You can override this by setting kubernetes.workload_type in your spec file.

Security Defaults

Every generated chart enforces CleanStart security hardening:

# Pod-levelsecurityContext:  runAsUser: 65532  runAsGroup: 65532  fsGroup: 65532  runAsNonRoot: true  shareProcessNamespace: true    # Enables kubectl debug # Container-levelsecurityContext:  readOnlyRootFilesystem: true  allowPrivilegeEscalation: false  capabilities:    drop: ["ALL"]

Writable paths declared in the image spec are automatically mounted as emptyDir volumes with appropriate size limits.

Using CleanStart Images with Bitnami Charts

If you already use Bitnami Helm charts, you can swap in CleanStart images without rewriting the chart. CleanStart provides values overlay files for common applications:

helm install mongodb bitnami/mongodb \  -f your-values.yaml \  -f mongodb-clnstrt-values.yaml

This overrides the image source, converts exec-based probes to TCP/HTTP socket probes (required for distroless images), and applies CleanStart security context defaults.

Generate an overlay for any Bitnami chart with:

cleanimg build <spec>.cleanimg.yaml --generate-bitnami-values

See Bitnami Migration Guide for details.

Chart Validation

Validate generated charts before deploying:

helm lint output/redis/helm/redis/helm template output/redis/helm/redis/ | kubectl apply --dry-run=client -f -

CleanStart also includes a validation script that runs both lint and template dry-run:

./pipeline/scripts/validate-k8s-helm.sh output/redis/helm/redis/

Annotations and Metadata

Generated charts include CleanStart metadata as annotations on workloads:

CPE (Common Platform Enumeration) metadata is also embedded for vulnerability correlation.