Background

When developing and testing applications locally using a Kubernetes cluster running in Docker (e.g. kind), images are typically loaded directly into the cluster using kind load docker-image rather than being pushed to a remote registry. In this workflow, Kubernetes should not attempt to pull the image from a registry — it should use the locally loaded image as-is.

Currently, imagePullPolicy is hardcoded to Always in the common chart, making this local development workflow impossible without workarounds.

Changes

• Adds a global imagePullPolicy value that applies to all containers. Defaults to Always, so existing deployments are unaffected.
• Adds a per-container pullPolicy field that overrides the global value for that specific container.

Usage

A typical local development setup with a values-local.yaml:

imagePullPolicy: Never

Combined with:

docker build -t my-app:local .
kind load docker-image my-app:local
helm upgrade --install myapp . -f values.yaml -f values-local.yaml

For multi-container pods where only one container uses a local image:

common:
  containers:
    - name: myapp
      image: my-app:local
      pullPolicy: Never
    - name: sidecar
      image: eu.gcr.io/entur/sidecar:1.0
      # uses global default (Always)

Compatibility

Fully backwards compatible — the default remains Always.