// the find
vmware-tanzu/kubeapps
A web-based UI for deploying and managing applications in Kubernetes clusters
Kubeapps is a web UI for deploying Helm charts, Flux packages, and Carvel bundles into Kubernetes clusters, with RBAC and OIDC auth baked in. It was a VMware Tanzu project aimed at platform teams who want a self-hosted "app store" experience inside their clusters. The project was deprecated in August 2025 and archived — the SAP SE fork is now the active upstream.
The plugin architecture using gRPC is genuinely well-designed — Helm, Flux, and Carvel each live as separate plugins behind a common API interface, so adding a new package format doesn't require touching core logic. OIDC and Pinniped support is first-class, not bolted on. The apprepository controller is a proper Kubernetes CRD-backed controller with informers and listers, not just a cron job hitting an API. Test coverage across both unit and integration layers is solid, with real testdata fixtures rather than mocks for chart parsing.
The project is archived and no longer maintained by the original team — you are now inheriting a dead upstream, and the SAP fork is weeks old with unclear long-term commitment. The frontend is React but ships as a bundled dashboard pod, making it painful to customize or theme without forking the whole build pipeline. Multi-cluster support exists but is documented as experimental and the RBAC surface gets complicated fast across cluster boundaries. The asset-syncer component pulls chart indices into Postgres on a schedule, which means there's always lag between a chart being published and it appearing in the UI — no push path exists.