helmCharts: kyaml fails when encounting helm charts with emty values.yaml files

[djfinnoy]

What happened?

After upgrading from 5.3.0 to 5.4.2 we encountered a bug where kustomize has started failing with the following error:

Error: could not parse values file into rnode: EOF 

The bug affects helm charts with an empty values.yaml file.
We have a private helm chart where the default values.yaml files that is packaged alongside the chart is empty, and we typically use valuesInline in kustomize to pass values.

# kustomization.yaml

apiVersion: kustomize.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Kustomization

helmCharts:
  - name: my-libchart
    repo: oci://europe-west1-docker.pkg.dev/my-project/my-chart
    valuesInline:
      someKey: someValue

The issue is that the following function returns an error due to the lack of a populated values.yaml file.

I have found two ways to fix the issue:

• Use valuesFile instead of (or in addition to) valuesInline.
• Add any key-value pair to the upstream helm chart so that it no longer has an empty values file (this is our workaround for the time being).

What did you expect to happen?

The replaceValuesInline() should tolerate empty helm values files.

How can we reproduce it (as minimally and precisely as possible)?

# kustomization.yaml
apiVersion: kustomize.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Kustomization

helmCharts:
  - name: my-libchart
    repo: file://path/to/helmchart/with/empty/valuesfile
    valuesInline:
      someKey: someValue

Expected output

No error

Actual output

Error

Kustomize version

5.4.2

Operating system

Linux

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