This document describes the Kubeapps architecture at a high level.
At the heart of Kubeapps is an in-cluster Kubernetes dashboard that provides you a simple browse and click experience for installing and managing Kubernetes applications packaged as Helm charts.
The dashboard is written in the JavaScript programming language and is developed using the React JavaScript library.
The Kubeapps APIs service provides a pluggable, gRPC-based API service enabling the Kubeapps UI (or other clients) to interact with different Kubernetes packaging formats in a consistent, extensible way.
You can read more details about the architecture, implementation and getting started in the Kubeapps APIs developer documentation.
Chart repositories in Kubeapps are managed with a CustomResourceDefinition called apprepositories.kubeapps.com. Each repository added to Kubeapps is an object of type AppRepository and the apprepository-controller will watch for changes on those types of objects to update the list of available charts to deploy.
The asset-syncer component is a tool that scans a Helm chart repository and populates chart metadata in a database. This metadata is then served by the Helm plugin of the kubeapps-apis component. Check more details about the implementation in this document.