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Getting Started

Runtime environment

It is recommend to run ArgoCD Image Updater in the same Kubernetes cluster that ArgoCD is running in, however, this is not a requirement. In fact, it is not even a requirement to run ArgoCD Image Updater within a Kubernetes cluster or with access to any Kubernetes cluster at all.

However, some features might not work without accessing Kubernetes.

Prerequisites

ArgoCD Image Updater will need access to the API of your ArgoCD installation. If you chose to install the ArgoCD Image Updater outside of the cluster where ArgoCD is running in, the API must be exposed externally (i.e. using Ingress). If you have network policies in place, make sure that ArgoCD Image Updater will be allowed to communicate with the ArgoCD API, which is usually the service argocd-server in namespace argocd on port 443 and port 80.

Create a local user within ArgoCD

ArgoCD Image Updater needs credential for accessing the ArgoCD API. Using a local user is recommended, but a project token will work as well (although, this will limit updating to the applications of the given project obviously).

Let's use an account named image-updater with appropriate API permissions.

Add the following user definition to argocd-cm:

data:
  # ...
  accounts.image-updater: apiKey

Now, you will need to create an access token for this user, which can be either done using the CLI or the Web UI. The following CLI command will create a named token for the user and print it to the console:

argocd account generate-token --account image-updater --id image-updater

Copy the token's value somewhere, you will need it later on.

Granting RBAC permissions in ArgoCD

The technical user image-updater we have configured in the previous step now needs appropriate RBAC permissions within ArgoCD. ArgoCD Image Updater needs the update and get permissions on the applications you want to manage.

A most basic version that grants get and update permissions on all of the applications managed by ArgoCD might look as follows:

p, role:image-updater, applications, get, */*, allow
p, role:image-updater, applications, update, */*, allow
g, image-updater, role:image-updater

You might want to strip that down to apps in a specific project, or to specific apps, however.

Put the RBAC permissions to ArgoCD's argocd-rbac-cm ConfigMap and ArgoCD will pick them up automatically.

Installing as Kubernetes workload

Installation is straight-forward. Don't worry, without any configuration, it will not start messing with your workloads yet.

Note

We also provide a Kustomize base in addition to the plain Kubernetes YAML manifests. You can use it as remote base and create overlays with your configuration on top of it. The remote base's URL is https://github.com/argoproj-labs/argocd-image-updater/manifests/base

Create a dedicated namespace for ArgoCD Image Updater

kubectl create ns argocd-image-updater`

Apply the installation manifests

kubectl apply -n argocd-image-updater -f manifests/install.yaml

A word on high availabilty

It is not advised to run multiple replicas of the same ArgoCD Image Updater instance. Just leave the number of replicas at 1, otherwise weird side effects could occur.

Configure API access token secret

When installed from the manifests into a Kubernetes cluster, the ArgoCD Image Updater reads the token required for accessing ArgoCD API from an environment variable named ARGOCD_TOKEN, which is set from a a field named argocd.token in a secret named argocd-image-updater-secret.

The value for argocd.token should be set to the base64 encoded value of the access token you have generated above. As a short-cut, you can use generate the secret with kubectl and apply it over the existing resource:

kubectl create secret generic argocd-image-updater-secret \
  --from-literal argocd.token=$YOUR_TOKEN --dry-run -o yaml |
  kubectl -n argocd-image-updater apply -f -

You must restart the argocd-image-updater pod after such a change, i.e run

kubectl rollout restart deployment argocd-image-updater

Or alternatively, simply delete the running pod to have it recreated by Kubernetes automatically.

Running locally

As long as you have access to the ArgoCD API and your Kubernetes cluster from your workstation, running ArgoCD Image Updater is simple. Make sure that you have your API token noted and that your Kubernetes client configuration points to the correct K8s cluster.

Grab the binary (it does not have any external dependencies) and run:

export ARGOCD_TOKEN=<yourtoken>
./argocd-image-updater \
  --kubeconfig ~/.kube/config
  --argocd-server-addr argo-cd.example.com
  --once

Note: The --once flag disables the health server and the check interval, so the tool will not regulary check for updates but exit after the first run.

Check argocd-image-updater --help for a list of valid command line flags, or consult the appropriate section of the documentation.

Running multiple instances

Generally, multiple instances of ArgoCD Image Updater can be run within the same Kubernetes cluster, however they should not operate on the same set of applications. This allows for multiple application teams to manage their own set of applications.

If opting for such an approach, you should make sure that:

  • Each instance of ArgoCD Image Updater runs in its own namespace
  • Each instance has a dedicated user in ArgoCD, with dedicated RBAC permissions
  • RBAC permissions are set-up so that instances cannot interfere with each others managed resources