Installing OpenSearch Dashboards using Helm

Helm is a package manager that allows you to easily install and manage OpenSearch Dashboards in a Kubernetes cluster. You can define your OpenSearch configurations in a YAML file and use Helm to deploy your applications in a version-controlled and reproducible way.

The Helm chart contains the resources described in the following table.

The specification in the default Helm chart supports many standard use cases and setups. You can modify the default chart to configure your desired specifications and set Transport Layer Security (TLS) and role-based access control (RBAC).

For information about the default configuration, steps to configure security, and configurable parameters, see the README.

The instructions here assume you have a Kubernetes cluster with Helm preinstalled. See the Kubernetes documentation for steps to configure a Kubernetes cluster and the Helm documentation to install Helm.

Prerequisites

Install OpenSearch. For more information, see Installing OpenSearch using Helm. The OpenSearch Dashboards chart connects to the opensearch-cluster-master service that the OpenSearch chart creates by default.

Make sure that you can send requests to your OpenSearch pod:

curl -XGET https://localhost:9200 -u 'admin:<custom-admin-password>' --insecure

The response contains the cluster information:

{
  "name" : "opensearch-cluster-master-0",
  "cluster_name" : "opensearch-cluster",
  "cluster_uuid" : "72e_wDs1QdWHmwum_E2feA",
  "version" : {
    "distribution" : "opensearch",
    "number" : "3.9.0",
    "build_type" : "tar",
    "build_hash" : "<build-hash>",
    "build_date" : "<build-date>",
    "build_snapshot" : false,
    "lucene_version" : "<lucene-version>",
    "minimum_wire_compatibility_version" : "2.19.0",
    "minimum_index_compatibility_version" : "2.0.0"
  },
  "tagline" : "The OpenSearch Project: https://opensearch.org/"
}

Install OpenSearch Dashboards using Helm

The following steps use the opensearch Helm repository that you added when you installed OpenSearch.

1. Deploy OpenSearch Dashboards:

   helm install my-dashboards opensearch/opensearch-dashboards
   

   To customize the deployment, pass in the values that you want to override using a custom YAML file:

   helm install my-dashboards opensearch/opensearch-dashboards -f customvalues.yaml
   

   The output shows the deployed release:

   NAME: my-dashboards
   LAST DEPLOYED: Fri Oct  2 02:30:49 2026
   NAMESPACE: default
   STATUS: deployed
   REVISION: 1
   TEST SUITE: None
   NOTES:
   1. Get the application URL by running these commands:
     export POD_NAME=$(kubectl get pods --namespace default -l "app.kubernetes.io/name=opensearch-dashboards,app.kubernetes.io/instance=my-dashboards" -o jsonpath="{.items[0].metadata.name}")
     export CONTAINER_PORT=$(kubectl get pod --namespace default $POD_NAME -o jsonpath="{.spec.containers[0].ports[0].containerPort}")
     echo "Visit http://127.0.0.1:8080 to use your application"
     kubectl --namespace default port-forward $POD_NAME 8080:$CONTAINER_PORT
   

After the deployment completes, follow these steps to access OpenSearch Dashboards:

1. To make sure your OpenSearch Dashboards pod is up and running, run the following command:

   kubectl get pods
   

   Wait until the OpenSearch Dashboards pod shows 1/1 in the READY column:

   NAME                                                   READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
   my-dashboards-opensearch-dashboards-567b777979-xx8jj   1/1     Running   0          70s
   opensearch-cluster-master-0                            1/1     Running   0          3m
   opensearch-cluster-master-1                            1/1     Running   0          3m
   opensearch-cluster-master-2                            1/1     Running   0          3m
   

2. Set up port forwarding from the OpenSearch Dashboards service:

   kubectl port-forward svc/my-dashboards-opensearch-dashboards 5601
   

3. In a web browser, go to http://localhost:5601 and log in as the admin user using the custom admin password that you set when you installed OpenSearch. For more information, see Accessing OpenSearch Dashboards.

   OpenSearch Dashboards can take about 1 minute after the pod is ready to finish starting. Until then, requests return a 503 error. If you receive this error, wait and then reload the page.

Uninstall using Helm

To identify the OpenSearch Dashboards deployment that you want to delete, run the following command:

helm list

The response lists the current Helm deployments:

NAME         	NAMESPACE	REVISION	UPDATED                                	STATUS  	CHART                      	APP VERSION
my-dashboards	default  	1       	2026-10-02 02:30:49.128429961 +0000 UTC	deployed	opensearch-dashboards-3.9.0	3.9.0
my-deployment	default  	1       	2026-10-02 02:28:00.553978943 +0000 UTC	deployed	opensearch-3.9.0           	3.9.0

To uninstall a deployment, run the following command:

helm uninstall my-dashboards

Related documentation

• Preparing OpenSearch Dashboards for production