Should jx step helm apply create/produce a helm release

Going throught the changelog, it seems that the tillerless mode has been made the default mode since version 2.0.246.

In Helm v2, Helm relies on its server side component called Tiller. The Jenkins X tillerless mode means that instead of using Helm to install charts, the Helm client is only used for templating and generating the Kubernetes manifests. But then, those manifests are applied normally using kubectl, not helm/tiller.

The consequence is that Helm won't know about this installations/releases, because they were made by kubectl. So that's why you won't get the list of releases using Helm. That's the expected behavior, as you can read on the Jenkins X docs.

What --no-tiller means is to switch helm to use template mode which means we no longer internally use helm install mychart to install a chart, we actually use helm template mychart instead which generates the YAML using the same helm charts and the standard helm confiugration management via --set and values.yaml files.

Then we use kubectl apply to apply the YAML.

As mentioned by James Strachan in the comments, when using the tillerless mode, you can view your deployments using jx step helm list