Support OCI Helm Chart Version Discovery (Using Registry Tag Listing)

Lens Support & Troubleshooting Feature Requests
1

Hi,

Currently, Kubernetes Lens does not support version discovery for OCI-based Helm charts.

Unlike traditional Helm repositories, OCI registries do not provide an index.yaml, which makes it impossible for Lens to:

  • List available chart versions

  • Detect newer versions

  • Notify users about updates

Additional Context:
Currently, when adding an OCI repository in Lens, it automatically adds only the latest chart version as a .tgz However, for full functionality, Lens (or an extension) should be able to:

  • Discover all available versions from the OCI registry

  • Prepare the repository in a way that allows deployment of any specific version, not just the latest

Proposed Solution

A possible approach is to implement OCI tag discovery by querying the registry directly.

For example, using tools like:

Lens (or an extension) could:

  1. Query the OCI registry for available tags

  2. Treat tags as chart versions

  3. Sort them using semantic versioning

  4. Compare with the currently deployed version

  5. Show update notifications in the UI

Example Command

crane ls ghcr.io/nginx/charts/nginx-gateway-fabric

exm output:

2.1.4
2.2.0
2.2.1
2.2.2
2.3.0
2.4.0
2.4.1
2.4.2

This returns all available chart versions (tags) from the OCI registry.

Why This Matters

  • OCI-based Helm charts are becoming more common

  • Users currently need external tools to track versions

  • Native support would significantly improve user experience

2

Hi @gungor10, thanks for the detailed feature request – and honestly, thanks for everything you’ve been reporting around OCI Helm support lately. Your reports have been consistently clear, well-structured, and actionable – that’s incredibly valuable for us. I’m bringing the version discovery topic directly to our engineering team. We’ll update this thread once we have more to share.