helm: Error: could not find a ready tiller pod

I’m bringing up Kubernetes on my Mac under minikube and xhyve, with the eye towards using Kubernetic to manage the whole thing. I installed helm from homebrew as brew install kubernetes-helm.

When I do pretty much any Helm command, I get this error message:

$ helm status
Error: could not find a ready tiller pod

which seems pretty fundamental of a problem. I am not sure how to proceed from here, suggestions for debugging or component installation welcomed. However the upgrade seems to work:

$ helm init --upgrade
$HELM_HOME has been configured at /Users/emv/.helm.

Tiller (the helm server side component) has been upgraded to the current version.
Happy Helming!

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 7 years ago
Reactions: 33
Comments: 22 (3 by maintainers)

Commits related to this issue

Allow more characters in label selectors (#2064) Label selectors also allows ".", "/" and "+" now Fixes #970 — committed to Nordix/helm by Sajfer 2 years ago

Most upvoted comments

Run this command may solve your issue. kubectl logs --namespace kube-system tiller-deploy-2654728925-j2zvk

+27

charlenezheng on Sep 3, 2018

I did two things, and now it’s working.

minikube addons enable registry-creds seemed to address the problem of “no credentials on this request”.

I also waited a long time, and it came up. I can’t be certain that the registry-creds addon was the fix, but now it’s working:

$ kubectl -n kube-system get po
NAME                             READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
kube-addon-manager-minikube      1/1       Running   0          1h
kube-dns-v20-ir9j5               3/3       Running   0          51m
kubernetes-dashboard-gxj81       1/1       Running   0          51m
tiller-deploy-2654728925-j2zvk   1/1       Running   0          1h

Thanks @bacongobbler for the debug help, I’ll close this out.

+23

vielmetti on Mar 3, 2017

if you run kubectl -n kube-system get po, do you see a tiller-deploy pod available there?

+13

bacongobbler on Mar 3, 2017

allow master to run pods: kubectl taint nodes --all node-role.kubernetes.io/master-

source-ram on Nov 6, 2019

If anyone else arrives at this point because you’re scripting up a helm init followed by a helm upgrade --install, the good news is you can now use the wait command to wait for the pod to be ready before you do the upgrade. In the below I’m using labels to select the right pod:

kubectl -n kube-system wait --for=condition=Ready pod -l name=tiller --timeout=300s

stevegore on Jun 28, 2019

hi, sorry to reopen this, in my case

$ kubectl get po -n kube-system
NAME                                  READY     STATUS     RESTARTS   AGE
tiller-deploy-6479f5f854-p7nsn   1/1       Running   0          1h

but when i run helm version i still get Error: could not find a ready tiller pod

$ helm version
Client: &version.Version{SemVer:"v2.11.0", GitCommit:"2e55dbe1fdb5fdb96b75ff144a339489417b146b", GitTreeState:"clean"}
Error: could not find a ready tiller pod

I am still running on kubernetes v1.8.13 though if it means something.

is there something i am still missing? thanks

kavemun on Dec 4, 2018

@vielmetti Thanks! - I can confirm “minikube addons enable registry-creds” was the fix for my tiller pod not starting.

CharlieKuharski on Jun 7, 2018

Nothing in this thread helped me with the issue, although restarting Docker fixed it.

micseydel on Mar 30, 2020

Sounds familiar. Happens to me all the time. Thanks for replying.

peterzandbergen on Dec 26, 2017

looks like everything in kube-system is in a pending state. Are you sure your cluster is healthy?

bacongobbler on Jan 7, 2019