Why does Helm Charts interpret 0777 as 511?

It took me quite some time to debug it.

In my values.yaml file, I had a variable called customScriptDefaultMode, which was set to 0777.

File: values.yaml

customScriptDefaultMode: 0777
customScripts:
	hello.sh: |
		#!/bin/bash
		echo hello world

Then, in my templates, I tried to use that value for the defaultMode of a volume. Here's the code:

File: templates/deployment.yaml

{{- if .Values.customScripts }}
- name: custom-scripts
  configMap:
    name: {{ include "airflow.fullname" . }}-custom-scripts
    defaultMode: {{ .Values.customScriptDefaultMode }}
{{- end }}

When I ran helm template . to render the template, I expected to see 0777. However, what I got was 511. Here's the relevant part of the output:

---
volumes:
  - name: airflow-config
    configMap:
      name: airflow
  - name: custom-scripts
    configMap:
      name: airflow-custom-scripts
      defaultMode: 511

My expectation was:

---
volumes:
  - name: airflow-config
    configMap:
      name: airflow
  - name: custom-scripts
    configMap:
      name: airflow-custom-scripts
      defaultMode: 0777

Naturally, I was confused and frustrated. I searched the internet for an explanation and found a Stack Overflow post that shed some light on the issue. According to one of the answers, if an argument is a string and starts with "0x", "0b", or "0", it is interpreted as a hexadecimal, binary, or octal string, respectively.

So, in my case, "0777" is being treated as an octal string. And since "0777" in octal is equivalent to "511" in decimal, that's what we get.

But here's the catch: if we put 0777 in single quotes ('0777'), it will be treated as a string, not a number. And that can cause issues because the defaultMode in Kubernetes specs must be a number.

ValidationError(Deployment.spec.template.spec.volumes[1].configMap.defaultMode): invalid type for io.k8s.api.core.v1.ConfigMapVolumeSource.defaultMode: got "string", expected "integer"

So, the correct way to set the defaultMode in Helm templates is to use double quotes ("0777"). This way, it will be treated as a number, not a string 🤯.

# Wrong 🛑
customScriptDefaultMode: 0777
# Wrong 🛑
customScriptDefaultMode: '0777'
# Correct ✅
customScriptDefaultMode: "0777"

References

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/33168435
• Template Function List > toDecimal