"Error: forwarding ports: Upgrade request required" Error in helm of a kubernetes cluster

Question

I have a kubernetes cluster built using kubespray and imported to Rancher.

The nodes are configured with

• CentOS Linux 7 3.10.0-957.12.1.el7.x86_64
• Docker version : 18.9.5
• Kubelet version : v1.14.1
• Tiller version : v2.14.1 ( got this version from the tiller pod's image gcr.io/kubernetes-helm/tiller:v2.14.1 )

All the tiller resources are working fine:

$ kubectl get all -n kube-system | findstr tiller

pod/tiller-deploy-57ff77d846-frtb7             1/1       Running   0          12d

service/tiller-deploy          ClusterIP   10.233.49.112   <none>        44134/TCP                16d

deployment.apps/tiller-deploy             1         1         1            1           16d

replicaset.apps/tiller-deploy-57ff77d846             1         1         1         12d
replicaset.apps/tiller-deploy-69d5cd79bb             0         0         0         16d

But when I run the helm commands, I am getting this error:

$ helm version

Client: &version.Version{SemVer:"v2.11.0", GitCommit:"2e55dbe1fdb5fdb96b75ff144a339489417b146b", GitTreeState:"clean"}
Error: forwarding ports: error upgrading connection: Upgrade request required

$ helm ls

Error: forwarding ports: error upgrading connection: Upgrade request required

I tried:

• The tiller version is 2.14.1. So, upgraded the helm client to version 2.14.1 from 2.11.0. But that doesn't solves the issue.

Can someone help me to solve this error?

Answer 1

See my answer here:

Ran into this today when trying to use Garden.io for a cluster running in Jelastic.

Found the solution in this Github comment:

First acquire a local binary for Tiller (server-version of Helm), either by compiling or by downloading it from the release page.

Then run:

$ export HELM_HOST=":44134"
$ tiller -listen ${HELM_HOST} -alsologtostderr >/dev/null 2>&1 &

This will run a local version of the Kubernetes Helm Server. Now try your original command again, kubectl, that will delegate to this local Helm instead and manage to connect.