helm dry run install

As stated on Helm's documentation

When you want to test the template rendering, but not actually install anything, you can use helm install --debug --dry-run ./mychart. This will send the chart to the Tiller server, which will render the templates. But instead of installing the chart, it will return the rendered template to you so you can see the output

So it still needs to connect to Tiller to render your templates with the right values. The difference when using the --dry-run option is that it won't actually install the chart.

There is also an option to run helm template ./mychart to render the generated YAMLs without needing the connection to tiller. Combined with helm lint it's a great set to verify validity of your chart.

There is a small diff between helm install --dry-run and helm template command:

• helm install --dry-run will send your chart to the tiller which will verify and render the manifest files against the K8S specs along with the YAML validations.

• helm template will only generate the manifest and verify if your YAML file is valid. However, it won't check if the generated manifests are valid Kubernetes resources. Ref: Helm Docs

Hope this helps!