Argo CD Configs

Contains raw Kubernetes manifests that contain resources that Argo CD deploys to Kubernetes.

📝 The github.com/adfinis/argocd-configs repository contains a basic Argo CD sandbox environment that can be started in a local kind environment easily. If can be used as a template to start new repos or as a standalone playground.

Bootstrap

To bootstrap an environment the following steps on the CLI should get you started.

First you will need a Kubernetes environment. This example works well with kind:

kind create cluster

If you can't use kind, any other Kubernetes distro that supports port-forwarding should work as well. e.g. if you want to isolate the environment in a VM, you might use minishift:

minikube start

Once you have access to a running Kubernetes, you can proceed to deploy Argo CD.

# check you are using the right context
kubectl config current-context

# install with Helm
helm repo add argo https://argoproj.github.io/argo-helm
helm repo update
helm install --create-namespace --namespace infra-argocd argocd argo/argo-cd

# wait for it to deploy and connect
kubectl -n infra-argocd wait pods --selector app.kubernetes.io/instance=argocd --for condition=Ready --timeout=90s
kubectl -n infra-argocd get secret argocd-initial-admin-secret -o jsonpath="{.data.password}" | base64 -d
kubectl -n infra-argocd port-forward service/argocd-server 8080:443

Once this is done, we can configure Argo CD using kubectl apply:

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
---
apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1
kind: AppProject
metadata:
  name: infra-argocd
  namespace: infra-argocd
spec:
  clusterResourceWhitelist:
  - group: ""
    kind: Namespace
  - group: apiextensions.k8s.io
    kind: CustomResourceDefinition
  - group: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
    kind: ClusterRoleBinding
  - group: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
    kind: ClusterRole
  description: Deploy and manage the hosted Argo CD instance.
  destinations:
  - namespace: infra-argocd
    server: https://kubernetes.default.svc
  sourceRepos:
  - https://argoproj.github.io/argo-helm
  - https://charts.adfinis.com
  - https://github.com/adfinis/argocd-configs.git
EOF

kubectl apply -f manifests/dev/infra-apps.yaml

After these steps you'll have to restart the port-forward since Argo CD will have redeployed itself.

kubectl -n infra-argocd port-forward service/argocd-server 8080:443

Reload the page and the following apps should be configured and healthy.

• infra-apps (app-of-apps application for managing baseline infrastructure)
• app-argocd (application for managing Argo CD deployment)

To ensure that everything we applied with kubectl is managed by Argo CD going forward, we create a misc-apps application that managed the app-argocd-apps application.

kubectl apply -f manifests/dev/misc-apps.yaml

With this some more apps will show up in the UI:

• misc-apps (app-of-apps application for managing several misc apps)
• app-argocd-apps (application for managing applications in Argo CD)
• argocd-configs (application for the gitops integration of this repository)

Now that you have Argo CD deployed and managed via a git repository you can start using it. In a typical production environment you could consider the following next steps:

• Replace wildcarded versions by replacing the * in targetRevision: "*" with a specific version
• Deploy applications by enabling them in infra-apps.yaml, misc-apps.yaml, or by adding more YAML
• Configure Argo CD to support SSO
• Harden Argo CD

To deploy applications using the managed Argo CD instance, you'll create additional manifests/dev/app-$name.yaml files. If the application is available in an Adfinis app-of-apps chart, then the file would be called manifests/dev/$name-apps.yaml.

If you want to get rid of the environment you built, we recommend that you remove the underlying Kubernetes cluster:

# if you are running kind
kind delete cluster

# if you are running in a minikube VM
minikube delete