An Argo CD plugin that behaves in a way we wish Argo CD behaved. This is only aimed at using Argo CD for GitOps - we do not use the UI for creating or modifying applications.

• Composite multiple things together to form a single app from multiple directories. For example - two or more Helm charts together as a single app. Or a Helm chart with a bit of plain yaml (a secret) to supplement it.
• Trivially allows Helm + Kustomize to work together, just works as you'd hope. Put a helm Chart.yaml+values.yaml in a folder, alongside a kustomization.yaml and you can kustomize your helm output or add more objects with kustomize
• When used with application sets you can apply Kustomization and modify Helm's values.yaml per application to apply minor differences to your applications trivially.
• Chain several plugins together. argocd-lovely-plugin acts as a master plugin runner (acting as the only plugin to Argo CD), and then runs other Argo CD compatible plugins in a chain. This acts a bit like a unix pipe, so you can helm | kustomize | argocd-vault-replacer.

• Allows for better GitOps with one argo application per real application.
• Keep complex applications structured with subdirectories
• DRY (Don't repeat yourself) more
  • Allows Argo CD to Kustomize per application.
  • Combines particularly well with application sets to allow broadly similar things to be partially modified by the application.

• Helm
• Kustomize
• Plain YAML

argocd-lovely-plugin does not support jsonnet as we do not use jsonnet, and haven't seen the need to use it. We don't know how it would best fit into the structure.

We aim to match the Argo CD supported versions by testing against the Argo CD N and N -1 versions of Argo CD. You can see the current versions of Argo CD that we test against by looking in the CI bootstrap directory in this repo.

You can use our Kustomization example to install Argo CD and to bootstrap the installation of the plugin at the same time. However the steps below will detail what is required should you wish to do things more manually.

Lovely is configured through environment variables. These can be set in both the argocd-repo-server and in the application itself.

If you are passing the configuration in as application environment variables in Argo CD 2.4 or higher you must not put the ARGOCD_ENV_ prefix on them, as Argo CD does that for you.

Otherwise lovely will accept either form of all of the variables, with or without ARGOCD_ENV_, with the ARGOCD_ENV_ version taking precidence if you set both of them.

argocd-lovely-plugin is designed for minimal configuration and to do the right thing. The following environment variables can be used to change some behaviour:

• ARGOCD_ENV_LOVELY_PREPROCESSORS and ARGOCD_ENV_LOVELY_PLUGINS: Set to a comma separated list of binaries to run during preprocessing and as plugins. Read this for more on plugins.
• ARGOCD_ENV_LOVELY_KUSTOMIZE_PATH: Set to a path or binary name to use for Kustomize.
• ARGOCD_ENV_LOVELY_HELM_PATH: Set to a path or binary name to use for Helm.

You can use these environment variables for modifying helm's behaviour, and the values.yaml file. More generic manipulation of any file is available through preprocessing.

• ARGOCD_ENV_LOVELY_HELM_MERGE: to some yaml you'd like strategic merged merged into any values.yaml used by Helm.
• ARGOCD_ENV_LOVELY_HELM_PATCH: to some yaml or json you'd like json6902 patched into any values.yaml used by Helm.
• ARGOCD_APP_NAME: This can be used to set the Helm 'name' in the same way as releaseName works in Argo CD's standard Helm processing

There is no way to modify any other Helm files at this time.

You can use these environment variables for modifying kustomize's behaviour, and the kustomization.yaml file. More generic manipulation of any file is available through preprocessing.

• ARGOCD_ENV_LOVELY_KUSTOMIZE_MERGE: to some yaml you'd like strategic merged merged into any kustomization.yaml found.
• ARGOCD_ENV_LOVELY_KUSTOMIZE_PATCH: to some yaml or json you'd like json6902 patched into any kustomization.yaml found.

There is no way to modify any other files, that's what Kustomize itself is for.

You can use the helm chart inflation generator of kustomize this way. See the test for an example of this. If you do this none of the helm environment variables will have any effect as you can set those in your kustomization.yaml instead. There is no way to merge/patch your values.yaml with lovely only (you should run a preprocessor for that). Despite this, that is the recommended way to use helm and kustomize together. ARGOCD_APP_NAME will also have no effect here.

All argocd-lovely-plugin environment variables may be prefixed with ARGOCD_ENV_ for Argo CD 2.4 compatibility. For now, they will be picked up if not prefixed that way for backwards compatibility. If you are deranged and define both the ARGOCD_ENV_ version will be used.

Have a look at the examples directory for a list of examples of how you can use this to make nice git repos for your applications. This also refers to the test directory, which contains a number of examples that also serve as CI/CD tests for this plugin.

This is not a templating tool, there are plenty of choices out there to that stuff. It just brings together external tools.

Firstly we scan the working application directory for yaml files. At each shallowest point where one is found then it is marked as a separate sub-application for working on.

For each sub-application

• If there is a Chart.yaml then Helm will run the templating engine.
• If there is a kustomization.yaml then Kustomize will be run. If Helm was previously run the output of Helm will be added to the kustomization.yaml as a resource automatically.
• Only if neither a Chart.yaml nor a kustomization.yaml were found then all the yaml in the directory tree will be concatentated together.
• All plugins will be run, in order given to process the data.

All the sub-application yamls will be concatenated and the result will be fed to Argo CD (printed to stdout).

You can download argocd-lovely-plugin binary and run it in an application directory. Errors will go to stderr, and the rendered yaml will appear on stdout.

• You will need helm and kustomize on your path if you use those.
• You should set up the expected environment variables. Remember ARGOCD_APP_NAME needs to be set for helm chart rendering.

If you prefer to watch videos of things rather than read words, we have compiled some demos.

• Using Argo CD to Kustomize a Helm chart, and deploy additional manifests
• A bit about the general design of lovely plugin