Today I Learned: 09/11/2025 - Helm install command failing with 'Request Entity too large'

The helm install command can sometimes fail with an error like this:

Error: INSTALLATION FAILED: create: failed to create: Request entity too large: limit is 3145728

A colleague explained to me recently that this arises when the directory you’re running in has more than 3Mb of files in it (including in subdirectories). Even if the files are not used by the install command directly, helm compresses the contents of the directory to compare to previous versions to find changes. The simple fix is to move any unnecessary files out of the directory.