Fix crash on empty helm render: treat no-output chart as no-op

[Copilot]

When all chart templates are gated behind a falsy conditional, helm template --output-dir produces an empty directory. ReplaceWithRendered then crashed with an opaque assertion error because it expected exactly one subdirectory in the output dir.

Changes

• replace.go: After reading helmOutputDirEntries, if the slice is empty, remove the chart's content dirs (templates/, charts/, crds/) so subsequent helm processing also sees no resources, clean up the temp output dir, and return nil, nil (empty file list, no error). This is a no-op from the caller's perspective.

• testdata/charts/emptychart/: Minimal test chart with a ConfigMap template fully gated behind {{- if .Values.enabled }} (default: false).

• integration_test.go: New "empty render no op" integration test exercising this path via OverrideNamespace (which forces ReplaceWithRendered to be called).

Example

# templates/configmap.yaml — renders nothing by default
{{- if .Values.enabled }}
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: {{ .Release.Name }}-cm
{{- end }}

Previously, running chartify against such a chart (with any of OverrideNamespace, JsonPatches, StrategicMergePatches, or Transformers configured) would crash:

assertion failed: unexpected dir entry "" it must be the abs path to the output directory

After this fix, chartify returns successfully with an empty resource list.

• Fixes chartify crashes on empty render: expose sentinel error or treat as no-op #206

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This pull request updates Chartify’s Helm render/replace pipeline to gracefully handle charts that render zero resources (empty helm template --output-dir result), treating that case as a successful no-op instead of crashing with an assertion error. This aligns Chartify behavior with downstream expectations (e.g., helmfile) and prevents kustomize/patch processing from running on an empty resource set.

Changes:

• Handle empty helm template --output-dir output in ReplaceWithRendered by cleaning up rendered/output dirs and chart content dirs, then returning an empty rendered-file list without error.
• Skip the kustomize build/patch step when there are no generated manifest files, even if patch options were provided.
• Add an integration test chart and new integration + unit tests to cover empty-render behavior (including dependency cleanup).

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 10 out of 10 changed files in this pull request and generated 1 comment.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
replace.go	Detects empty helm output-dir and treats it as a no-op success while still performing dependency/lock cleanup.
chartify.go	Skips kustomize patch/build when generatedManifestFiles is empty to avoid patching/building nothing.
integration_test.go	Adds integration coverage for “empty render no op” and “empty render with patch” scenarios.
chartify_test.go	Adds a focused unit test to ensure dependency cleanup still happens on empty renders.
testdata/charts/emptychart/Chart.yaml	Introduces a minimal chart that renders nothing by default to exercise the empty-render path.
testdata/charts/emptychart/values.yaml	Defaults enabled: false to ensure the chart renders no resources.
testdata/charts/emptychart/templates/configmap.yaml	Template gated behind Values.enabled, producing zero manifests by default.
testdata/chart_patch/configmap.emptychart.strategic.yaml	Patch fixture used by the “empty render with patch” integration test.
testdata/integration/testcases/empty_render_no_op/want	Snapshot expectation for the empty-render no-op integration case (empty output).
testdata/integration/testcases/empty_render_with_patch/want	Snapshot expectation for the empty-render-with-patch integration case (empty output).

Suppressed comments (1)

integration_test.go:283

• Same as above: this snippet uses go1.25 but go.mod declares go 1.26.0, so go1.25 test will error. Use go test (or go1.26 test) in the example command.

	// SAVE_SNAPSHOT=1 go1.25 test -run ^TestIntegration/empty_render_with_patch$ ./

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Copilot reviewed 10 out of 10 changed files in this pull request and generated no new comments.