Overview

What Is Argo CD?

Argo CD is a declarative, GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes.

Why Argo CD?

Application definitions, configurations, and environments should be declarative and version controlled. Application deployment and lifecycle management should be automated, auditable, and easy to understand.

Getting Started

Quick Start

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

Follow our getting started guide. Further documentation is provided for additional features.

How it works

Argo CD follows the GitOps pattern of using Git repositories as the source of truth for defining the desired application state. Kubernetes manifests can be specified in several ways:

• kustomize applications
• helm charts
• ksonnet applications
• jsonnet files
• Plain directory of YAML/json manifests
• Any custom config management tool configured as a config management plugin

Argo CD automates the deployment of the desired application states in the specified target environments. Application deployments can track updates to branches, tags, or pinned to a specific version of manifests at a Git commit. See tracking strategies for additional details about the different tracking strategies available.

For a quick 10 minute overview of Argo CD, check out the demo presented to the Sig Apps community meeting:

Architecture

Argo CD is implemented as a kubernetes controller which continuously monitors running applications and compares the current, live state against the desired target state (as specified in the Git repo). A deployed application whose live state deviates from the target state is considered OutOfSync. Argo CD reports & visualizes the differences, while providing facilities to automatically or manually sync the live state back to the desired target state. Any modifications made to the desired target state in the Git repo can be automatically applied and reflected in the specified target environments.

For additional details, see architecture overview.

Features

• Automated deployment of applications to specified target environments
• Support for multiple config management/templating tools (Kustomize, Helm, Ksonnet, Jsonnet, plain-YAML)
• Ability to manage and deploy to multiple clusters
• SSO Integration (OIDC, OAuth2, LDAP, SAML 2.0, GitHub, GitLab, Microsoft, LinkedIn)
• Multi-tenancy and RBAC policies for authorization
• Rollback/Roll-anywhere to any application configuration committed in Git repository
• Health status analysis of application resources
• Automated configuration drift detection and visualization
• Automated or manual syncing of applications to its desired state
• Web UI which provides real-time view of application activity
• CLI for automation and CI integration
• Webhook integration (GitHub, BitBucket, GitLab)
• Access tokens for automation
• PreSync, Sync, PostSync hooks to support complex application rollouts (e.g.blue/green & canary upgrades)
• Audit trails for application events and API calls
• Prometheus metrics
• Parameter overrides for overriding ksonnet/helm parameters in Git

Community Blogs And Presentations

• GitOps with Argo CD: Simplify and Automate Deployments Using GitOps with IBM Multicloud Manager
• KubeCon talk: CI/CD in Light Speed with K8s and Argo CD

• KubeCon talk: Machine Learning as Code

  • Among other things, describes how Kubeflow uses Argo CD to implement GitOPs for ML
• SIG Apps demo: Argo CD - GitOps Continuous Delivery for Kubernetes

Development Status

Argo CD is actively developed and is being used in production to deploy SaaS services at Intuit