How to Install ArgoCD with Helm On Local Dev Cluster

The Kubernetes community has widely embraced GitOps, with ArgoCD and Flux being among the most popular tools. I'd claim it very much about those two tools.

Personally, I am a huge fan of GitOps. It's something I always hoped for, even though I didn't know exactly what I was looking for a decade or two ago. It's probably the declarative approach, the level of automation, and the self-resilience that appeal to me. Today, it's a reality, and it's wonderful how well we can manage our environments, including infrastructure and the applications.

If you work a lot with ArgoCD, or just want to learn, you probably want to have it in your local dev environment to test your deployments. This short guide will show you how to install ArgoCD using Helm with custom values, having a custom setup for your specific environment. We will be using custom values by extracting the upstream value file and modifying specific settings to suit our needs.

What is ArgoCD

ArgoCD is a declarative, GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes. It automates the deployment of the desired application states in your Kubernetes cluster, directly from Git repositories.

Video that introduces you to GitOps:
https://devoriales.com/video/897990746/intro-to-gitops

Requirements

Before starting, ensure you have the following tools installed and configured:

1. Kubernetes cluster
2. kubectl - Kubernetes command-line tool
3. Helm 3.x - Helm package manager for Kubernetes
4. Ingress Controller - For managing external access to ArgoCD and services in your cluster.

There are some tutorials that you can follow if you lack some of these tools:

Set up your own cluster:
https://devoriales.com/post/267/creating-a-local-multi-node-k8s-cluster-with-microk8s-and-multipass

Set up ingress controller:
https://devoriales.com/post/342/how-to-configure-ingress-nginx-for-local-kubernetes-development

Installation

Add the ArgoCD Helm Repository

First, add the ArgoCD Helm repository to your local Helm configuration and update it.

helm repo add argo https://argoproj.github.io/argo-helm
helm repo update

helm show values argo/argo-cd > values.yaml

configs:
    server:
      # -- Disable TLS for HTTP access via ingress
      # @default -- `false`
      insecure: true

ingress:
  enabled: true
  controller: generic
  ingressClassName: "nginx"

global:
  domain: argocd.devoriales.local

helm install my-argo-cd argo/argo-cd --version 7.2.0 -f values.yaml

helm list -A
kubectl get all -n argocd

 kubectl get secret argocd-initial-admin-secret -n argocd -o jsonpath="{.data.password}" | base64 --decode