Getting Started with ArgoCD

Author/Maintainer: Amil Khan

Background

After moving BisQue to full K8s, I started using ArgoCD for BisQue as our Continuous Deployment system and was immediately blown away by the ease of use. I was forced to be more organized and structured with my GitHub commits, which resulted in more stable releases. My previous experience with the Argo team was with Argo Workflows loved that too so now BisQue's entire module execution engine is powered by Argo Workflows.

Choosing an Installation

ArgoCD offers two types of installation methods

• Quickstart install.yaml Mainly for trying out ArgoCD, small to large projects would see an immediate use case, in my opinion.
• Production HA ha/install.yaml The route to go for production

NOTE: I am assuming you have kubectl installed and you know the location of your KUBECONFIG file.

• [x] kubectl CLI Installed

- [x] KUBECONFIG (default location is ~/.kube/config).

Quickstart

kubectl create namespace argocd kubectl apply -n argocd -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/argoproj/argo-cd/stable/manifests/install.yaml

Creates argocd namespace and installs Argo CD application. You should see the following successful deployment of the pods:

[root@amil ~]# kubectl get pods -n argocd NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE argocd-notifications-controller-5549f47758-c46f7 1/1 Running 0 31m argocd-redis-79bdbdf78f-c42zc 1/1 Running 0 31m argocd-applicationset-controller-79f97597cb-bxfgg 1/1 Running 1 (30m ago) 31m argocd-dex-server-6fd8b59f5b-rzbpb 1/1 Running 0 31m argocd-application-controller-0 1/1 Running 0 31m argocd-repo-server-5569c7b657-k5h2f 1/1 Running 0 31m argocd-server-664b7c6878-dh2sb 1/1 Running 0 31m svclb-argocd-server-q6tpx 2/2 Running 0 16m

Access UI

Option 1 Port-Forwarding

kubectl port-forward svc/argocd-server -n argocd 8080:443 If you are using a remote machine, remember to set the --address flag.

Example with Address Flag kubectl port-forward svc/argocd-server -n argocd 8080:443 --address 128.112.93.8

Option 2 Service Type Load Balancer

kubectl patch svc argocd-server -n argocd -p '{"spec": {"type": "LoadBalancer"}}'

Login using UI

Get the Initial Password kubectl -n argocd get secret argocd-initial-admin-secret -o jsonpath="{.data.password}" | base64 -d; echo You should see an output similar to fboS9Fj-sBwetVyB which is our initial password.

USERNAME: admin PASSWORD: fboS9Fj-sBwetVyB

Add an Application

For this demonstration, I am using Argo Workflows and ArgoCD to showcase the continuous deployment and management side of ArgoCD. YES, ArgoCD managing itself!

I created a folder argo-workflows and got the quickstart-postgres.yaml for Argo Workflows into that folder. I also did the same for ArgoCD.

General Outline

1. Create Github Repo
2. Clone the repo locally
3. Create a folder for your application deployment argo-workflows
4. Go to the ArgoCD UI, Login, and select + NEW APP
5. Name your application, add the github repo, and specify the folder where your manifests live, argo-workflows
6. Hit CREATE!

mkdir argo-workflows cd argo-workflows wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/argoproj/argo-workflows/master/manifests/quick-start-postgres.yaml

If you did not specify Automatic Sync, then you have to manually click Sync when you create the application.