I built preview environments for Helm charts - here's Grafana deployed from a PR

Source: Dev.to

Overview

I’m a software engineer who happens to know Kubernetes. That made me the default reviewer for every Helm chart PR on my team. Colleagues would ping me to help them run charts on minikube just to test their changes. External PRs to our public chart repo would sit for days waiting for me to manually verify them.

I figured other teams must have the same problem—one or two people who understand Kubernetes and Helm, and everyone else waiting on them.

So I built Chart Preview – it deploys your Helm chart to a real Kubernetes cluster on every PR and gives you a preview URL. Think of it like Vercel/Netlify, but for Kubernetes.

Real example

• I forked the Grafana Helm chart
• Added a GitHub Action workflow
• Opened a PR
• Got a live Grafana instance (see below)

Forked Grafana Repo

PR Showing Checks

Grafana Login Page

Grafana Home

How it works

1. Add a GitHub Action workflow to your repo.
2. Open a PR → Chart Preview deploys your chart.
3. Get a unique preview URL.
4. When the PR closes, the environment is cleaned up.

Pricing

• Free tier: 1 concurrent preview
• Pro: $49 /mo (5 concurrent)

Questions for you

• Is this a real problem you’ve experienced?
• Would you use something like this, or just script it yourself?
• What’s missing? (e.g., would you want to deploy to your own cluster instead of ours?)

Check it out: