Publish the Helm Chart and CRDs directly

[knechtionscoding]

As we install with gitops tooling we don't want to run the kelos CLI to install itself, we'd like to install using well supported and conventional methods. This means using either kustomize or argocd which, ideally, means the helm chart and the CRDs are published individually and consumable outside of the repo

[kelos-bot]

🤖 Kelos Task Status

Task kelos-triage-781 has succeeded. ✅

[kelos-bot]

🤖 Kelos Agent @gjkim42

Kelos Triage Report

Kind: kind/feature
Priority: priority/important-longterm — Valuable for GitOps adoption but not blocking current functionality; users can still install via the CLI
Actor: needs human — Requires architectural decisions on chart publishing strategy (OCI registry vs GitHub Pages, CRD packaging approach, versioning scheme, CI/CD pipeline design)

Status: STILL VALID

Evidence:

• The Helm chart exists at internal/manifests/charts/kelos/ with templates for deployment, cronjob, RBAC, serviceaccount, and namespace — but it is embedded internally and not published as a standalone artifact
• The release workflow (.github/workflows/release.yaml) builds and pushes container images and CLI binaries only — there is no Helm chart packaging or publishing step
• No helm package, OCI push, or chart repository configuration exists anywhere in the codebase
• CRDs are not separately published or packaged for standalone consumption
• No merged PRs or commits reference this issue

Duplicates found: None found. #779 (controller resource configuration in chart values) is related but distinct — it addresses chart content, not chart distribution.

Recommendation: KEEP OPEN — This is a legitimate feature gap. Publishing the Helm chart (e.g., to an OCI registry via GHCR or a chart repository) and making CRDs independently consumable would significantly improve the GitOps/ArgoCD/Kustomize installation experience. Implementation will require decisions on: (1) chart distribution method (OCI artifact in GHCR vs GitHub Pages chart repo), (2) whether CRDs should be a separate chart or standalone manifests, (3) versioning strategy aligned with the existing release workflow.

[gjkim42]

@knechtionscoding
This is a valid request as well.
Will release an official helm chart soon.