The Helm Team is proud to announce the first stable release of Helm 4.
New Features
Helm 4 has numerous new features, but a few deserve highlighting here:
- Redesigned plugin system that supports Web Assembly based plugins
- Post-renderers are now plugins
- Server side apply is now supported
- Improved resource watching, to support waiting, based on kstatus
- Local Content-based caching (e.g. for charts)
- Logging via slog enabling SDK logging to integrate with modern loggers
- Reproducible builds of chart archives
- Updated SDK API including support for multiple chart API versions (new experimental v3 chart API version coming soon)
For full release notes, please see: https://helm.sh/docs/overview/
Compatibility with Helm v3
Helm v4 is a major version with backward incompatible changes including to the flags and output of the Helm CLI and to the SDK.
Please evaluate the changes to your workflows. The changes are not as extensive as those from Helm v2 to v3, with the goal that the majority of workflows remain compatible between Helm v3 and v4.
Helm charts apiVersion v2 (majority of today's charts) will continue to be supported in Helm v4. Existing charts should continue to install, upgrade, and otherwise work. Please test the installation and upgrade of charts to ensure it works as expected. Changes (e.g., server side apply) may impact the experience.
Community
The community keeps growing, and we'd love to see you there!
- Join the discussion in Kubernetes Slack:
- for questions and just to hang out
- for discussing PRs, code, and bugs
- Hang out at the Public Developer Call: Thursday, 9:30 Pacific via Zoom
- Test, debug, and contribute charts: ArtifactHub/packages
Installation and Upgrading
Download Helm v4.0.0. The common platform binaries are here:
The Quickstart Guide will get you going from there. For upgrade instructions or detailed installation notes, check the install guide. You can also use a script to install on any system with bash.
What's Next
- 3.19.3 and 4.0.1 are the next patch releases and will be on December 10, 2025
- 3.20.0 and 4.1.0 is the next minor releases and will be on January 21, 2026
Thank You!
The Helm project has enjoyed code contributions from many community members. Many more community members have assisted by filing issues and working with us to identify and eliminate bugs while adding new features. The #helm-users slack channel has long been a friendly and open forum for getting help and learning more about Helm. We cannot thank you enough for making this a helpful, friendly, and welcoming community for all.
❤️ The Helm Team