How to prevent helm upgrade from treating string as bool?

I'm running a helm upgrade command to install a certain chart. Of one the values I need to set is like this:

helm upgrade --install someService someChart `
             --set coredns.service.annotations."service\.beta\.kubernetes\.io/azure-load-balancer-internal"="true"

I have used this successfully with other charts but on this particular chart I'm getting the error

Error: unable to build kubernetes objects from release manifest: unable to decode "": json: cannot unmarshal bool into Go struct field ObjectMeta.metadata.annotations of type string

So it looks like helm is automatically converting that true into a bool. I already tried to use ="\"true\"" but that also didn't help.

Any ideas how to tell helm to not convert this to bool? (I do not have control over the helm chart)

Solution

You can use helm upgrade --set-string to force Helm to interpret the value as a string.

helm upgrade --install someService someChart \
             --set-string coredns...=true

Note that helm install --set has somewhat unusual syntax and quoting rules; you're already seeing this with the need to escape periods within a value name. You might find it clearer to write a YAML (or JSON) file of installation-specific values and pass that with a helm install -f option.

coredns:
  service:
    annotations:
      service.beta.kubernetes.io/azure-load-balancer-internal: "true"

helm upgrade --install someService someChart \
             -f local-values.yaml

This is a separate file from the values.yaml file that's part of the chart, and its values are merged with the chart's values with the local values taking precedence.