When you build custom Helm charts for your organisation, you need somewhere to store and distribute them. Public registries like Artifact Hub are not suitable for internal charts. ChartMuseum is an open-source Helm chart repository server that you can run on your own infrastructure — with support for local storage, AWS S3, GCS, Azure Blob, and more. How It Fits Into Your Workflow flowchart LR Dev[Developer] -->|helm package| Chart[chart.tgz] Chart -->|curl POST| CM[ChartMuseum Server] CM -->|stores in| Storage[Local / S3 / GCS / Azure] CI[CI Pipeline] -->|helm install| CM Cluster[Kubernetes Cluster] -->|pulls chart| CI ChartMuseum exposes a standard Helm repository API — any Helm client can add it as a repository and install charts from it exactly like any public repo.

Helm is the package manager for Kubernetes — the same idea as apt on Ubuntu or npm in Node.js, but for deploying applications to your cluster. Instead of writing and maintaining dozens of raw Kubernetes YAML files per application, you define a chart once, parameterise it with values, and deploy it consistently across every environment. Note: Helm 4 was released in 2025 with breaking changes. This guide covers Helm 3, which remains widely used and supported.