Configuring images for update¶

Annotation format¶

You can specify one or more image(s) for each application that should be considered for updates. To specify those images, the following annotation is used:

argocd-image-updater.argoproj.io/image-list: <image spec list>

The <image spec list> is a comma separated list of image specifications. Each image specification is composed of mandatory and optional information, and is used to specify the image, its version constraint and a few meta data.

An image specification could be formally described as:

[<image_name>=]<image_path>[:<version_constraint>][#<secret ref>]

Specifying the fields denoted in square brackets is optional and can be left out.

Allowing an image for update¶

The most simple form of specifying an image allowed to update would be the following:

argocd-image-updater.argoproj.io/image-list: nginx

The above example would specify to update the image nginx to it's most recent version found in the container registry, without taking any version constraints into cosideration.

This is most likely not what you want, because you could pull in some breaking changes when nginx releases a new major version and the image gets updated. So you can give a version constraint along with the image specification:

argocd-image-updater.argoproj.io/image-list: nginx:~1.26

The above example would allow the nginx image to be updated to any patch version within the 1.26 minor release.

More information on how to specify semantic version constraints can be found in the documentation of the Semver library we're using.

Naming images¶

Giving a name to an image is necessary in these scenarios:

If you want to use custom images with Kustomize. In this case, the name must match to what is defined in your Kustomize base.
If you need to specify the Helm parameters used for rendering the image name and version using Helm and the parameter names do not equal image.name and image.tag. In this case, the name is just symbolic.

Custom images with Kustomize¶

In Kustomize, if you want to use an image from another registry or a completely different image than what is specified in the manifests, you can give the image specification as follows:

<image_name>=<image_path>:<image_tag>

<image_name> will be the original image name, as used in your manifests, and <image_path>:<image_path> will be the value used when rendering the manifests.

Let's take ArgoCD's Kustomize base as an example: The original image used by ArgoCD is argoproj/argocd, pulled from the Docker Hub container registry. If you are about to follow the latest builds, as published on the GitHub registry, you could override the image specification in Kustomize as follows:

argoproj/argocd=docker.pkg.github.com/argoproj/argo-cd/argocd:1.7.0-a6399e59

Specifying Helm parameter names¶

Note

Image names should not be too complex. In case of Helm, they must only consist of letters and numbers because the names will be reused in Kubernetes annotation names, and thus, must fit in the overall naming convention of Kubernetes annotation names.

In case of Helm applications which contain more than one image in the manifests or use another set of parameters than image.name and image.tag to define which image to render in the manifests, you can use the <name> parameter in the image specification to define a (symbolic) name for that image. Then, you can use another set of annotations to specify the appropriate parameter names that should get set if an image gets updated.

For example, if you have an image quay.io/dexidp/dex that is configured in your helm chart using the dex.image.name and dex.image.tag Helm parameters, you can set the following annotations on your Application resource so that ArgoCD Image Updater will know which Helm parameters to set:

argocd-image-updater.argoproj.io/image-list: dex=quay.io/dexidp/dex
argocd-image-updater.argoproj.io/dex.image-name: dex.image.name
argocd-image-updater.argoproj.io/dex.image-tag: dex.image.tag

The general syntax for the two Helm specific annotations is:

argocd-image-updater.argoproj.io/<name>.image-name: <name of helm parameter to set>