HelmChart CRs that are in the manifests directory during startup will be edited on startup to inject cluster configuration. That's how we pass cluster configuration values to our bundled charts. That could probably be called out in the docs.

Anyways, now we are just using

helm template

to convert 2 helm charts, Weave and Docker Registry. I tried this approach with Certificate Manager although it silently fails to install. The CRD's are created but the pods are not listed. I am able to helm install it and deploy it using

kubectl apply

on the manifest files that I placed in the manifest directory. Ranchers documentation says that manifests are deployed "similar to

kubectl apply

". Are there any differences between

kubectl apply

and Ranchers approach that should be noted?

Are you sure that the flattened manifests include the CRDs? Sometimes you need to give

helm template

extra CLI flags to get them included.

kubectl describe addon

listed the CRDs that I would expect that relate to the service but nothing else that was relevant. The expected pods don't show up when running

kubectl get pods --all-namespaces

. When I delete the CRDs, then run

kubectl apply <service manifest files dir> --recursive

everything comes up as expected. Maybe I need to look into the

--recursive

option more based on the way rke2 is "running apply in a retry loop".

I would probably recommend templating to a single file per chart, rather than templating to a directory of multiple files

That ended up solving the issue, thanks!