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Getting Started ​

Verified against the Helm chart under charts/artifact-hub at commit 0d8b1c0. The managed option needs only a browser.

Prerequisites ​

  • For managed use: a web browser and, to publish, an account at artifacthub.io.
  • For self-hosting: a Kubernetes cluster, Helm, and a PostgreSQL database (the chart can deploy one or use an external instance).

Install ​

The fastest way to use Artifact Hub is the public instance at artifacthub.io; no install is needed. To run your own instance, deploy the official Helm chart:

bash
helm repo add artifact-hub https://artifacthub.github.io/helm-charts
helm install artifact-hub artifact-hub/artifact-hub

The chart's db-migrator job applies the Tern migrations automatically on install (charts/artifact-hub/templates/db_migrator_install_job.yaml).

A first working setup ​

The core job of Artifact Hub is indexing a repository so its packages become searchable. On a running instance:

  1. Sign in to the instance and open the control panel.

  2. Add a repository, choosing its kind (for example Helm) and URL, following the repositories guide.

    bash
    helm repo add my-charts https://example.com/charts

The tracker then scans the repository on its next run and registers each package; unchanged repositories are skipped by digest comparison (internal/tracker/tracker.go:41).

Verify it works ​

Before publishing, validate the repository metadata with the ah CLI:

bash
ah lint

A clean ah lint run means the repository's metadata will be accepted by the tracker. On a self-hosted instance, the hub server exposes Prometheus metrics on a separate port (cmd/hub/main.go:101) that you can scrape to confirm it is healthy.

Where to go next ​

For production concerns such as high availability, the database setup, and configuring the tracker and scanner, see the project's docs/architecture.md and the repositories guide. The Helm chart values cover deployment-level tuning.