TL;DR: I built a .NET library that renders Helm charts and drives Kubernetes releases without shelling out to the helm CLI. 129/129 templates across ingress-nginx, cert-manager, external-dns, podinfo, and metrics-server now render successfully. The main entry point is HelmSharp.Action, with lower-level packages available for chart loading, rendering, Kubernetes operations, and release storage. MIT licensed, looking for feedback and early adopters.
Why I Built This
At work, our .NET services deploy to Kubernetes through Helm. Every Docker image had to bundle the helm binary — another dependency to manage, another layer in the image, another surface for CVEs. I wanted to cut that out entirely and do Helm-style rendering directly in-process.
The .NET ecosystem doesn't really have this. There are YAML libraries. There are Kubernetes client libraries. There are template engines. But nothing ties them together the way helm template does — values merging, named templates, include, range, toYaml, the whole Sprig function set, all wired into a single render pipeline. So I started building one. (This is also my first real open source project — I'd spent years consuming OSS without contributing back, and HelmSharp is what came out of deciding to change that.)
