I was trying to downgrade my minikube cluster to have it match my cloud EKS cluster version wise.  I had various issues in this process, but got everything working after a while… except helm.

So, I could use kubectl and list pods, I had done a helm init to install tiller (or enabled the minikube tiller addon), and everything was working from that angle.

Doing a “helm list” was giving an interesting error though:

$ helm list                                           
E0115 15:11:56.503124   32232 portforward.go:391] an error occurred forwarding 33511 -> 44134: error forwarding port 44134 to pod 9d0d87a8b6d37fc96b7947d1b21c273c3e9dd63207253570f0694ee2db91c545, uid : unable to
 do port forwarding: socat not found.

After a while, I found this github entry: https://github.com/helm/helm/issues/1371 which says to install socat (which would seem obvious from the error message; but I don’t like to be hasty).

So, I ran:

sudo apt-get install socat -y

and then helm started working like a charm =). Hope that helps someone else too!