In #96 we have discussed about merging multiple sub-helmfiles into a single or central one, but stayed in favor of #151 #160. However it doesn't necessarily mean #160 is the end result.

How about introducing helmfiles: in helmfile.yaml to do the same thing with the helmfile.d feature, but for sub-helmfile located in arbitrary paths?

For example. this example helmfile.yaml would work exactly same as the helmfile.d:

helmfiles:
- helmfile.d/*.yaml

Helmfiles are sorted alphabetically per group = array item inside helmfiles:, so that you have granular control over ordering(#137).

Suppose I have my microservices organized in a Git reposistory that looks like:

• myteam/ (sometimes it is equivalent to a k8s ns, that is kube-system for clusterops team)
  • apps/
    • filebeat/
      • helmfile.yaml (no charts/ exists, because it depends on the stable/filebeat chart hosted on the official helm charts repository)
      • README.md (each app managed by my team has a dedicated README maintained by the owners of the app)
    • metricbeat/
      • helmfile.yaml
      • README.md
    • elastalert-operator/
      • helmfile.yaml
      • README.md
      • charts/
        • elastalert-operator/
          • <the content of the helm chart>

One of the benefits of this structure is that you can run git diff thing to locate in which directory=microservice a git commit has changes. My CI system is able to run a workflow for the changed microservice only.

A downside of this is that you don't have an obvious way to sync all microservices at once. That is, I have to run:

for d in apps/*; do helmfile -f $d diff; if [ $? -eq 2 ]; then helmfile -f $d sync; fi; done

At this point, you'll start writing a Makefile under myteam/ so that make sync-all will do the job.

The question is, can't we do better? I believe we can, with the proposed feature.

You would write a helmfile.yaml like:

helmfiles:
- apps/*/helmfile.yaml

So that you can get rid of the Makefile and the bash snippet.
Just run helmfile sync inside myteam/, and you are done.