Argo CD in a nutshell

Zero-conf, repeatable Argo CD environments for demoing, development purposes or troubleshooting (i.e. to reproduce an issue on a clean environment) using Vagrant and k3s in a single-node setup.

Please be aware that this is work in progress, and mainly serves for my own purposes. I thought it could be useful enough to share, however, so here it is.

Getting started

You will need Vagrant and VirtualBox installed on your system. Also, this box will set-up a private network with CIDR range 192.168.56.0/24, so make sure you don't have this already setup on your host, or have a route to an already existing net or host in that range.

Then:

git clone https://github.com/jannfis/argocd-nutshell
cd argocd-nutshell
vagrant up

This will fire up a VM with the default variant of Argo CD up & running. This can take a couple of minutes, depending on your network speed and general computer performance specs.

To make sure everything is up & running, ssh into the box and check the pods status:

$ vagrant ssh
vagrant@argocd-nutshell:~$ kubectl get pods -n argocd
NAME                                  READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
argocd-redis-6fb68d9df5-sx7xh         1/1     Running   0          4m30s
argocd-dex-server-748c65b578-kqlpp    1/1     Running   0          4m30s
argocd-application-controller-0       1/1     Running   0          4m30s
argocd-repo-server-64f4ddf469-mbdzn   1/1     Running   0          4m30s
argocd-server-846cf6844-9dvcl         1/1     Running   0          4m30s

If all pods are running correctly, you can then access the web UI by visiting

https://192.168.56.100

The default username is admin, and the default password is admin as well.

Teardown

When you had enough testing, simply run

vagrant destroy -f

within the directory that contains the Vagrantfile.

What's in it?

On top of the already mentioned K3s cluster and a default installation of Argo CD with minor customisation (i.e. service of type LoadBalancer and an admin password set), the following is currently included after the box has been provisioned:

kubectl pre-configured and with shell completion set-up
kubectx and kubens too, also with shell completion set-up
a kustomize binary in /usr/local/bin (version 3.9.1)
The latest released argocd CLI, ready to use logged into the Argo CD instance

Versions

By default, the most recent stable versions of Argo CD and K3S will be installed in the box.

You can override (pin) the versions installed by the default variant by setting some environment variables before running vagrant up:

ARGOCD_VERSION: This lets you specify another version of the manifests to install. This can be either a tag name (such as v1.8.2 or stable), or use HEAD to use the latest manifests from master branch.
ARGOCD_CLI_VERSION: Lets you specify the release tag of the Argo CD CLI to install. The special value latest (which is also the default) will look up the latest released version of the CLI from GitHub and install it.
ARGOCD_IMAGE: Lets you override the Argo CD container image to use with the manifests. This must be the full path and tag to the image, e.g. quay.io/argoproj/argocd:v1.8.2. By default, the images as defined in the manifests will be used.
K3S_VERSION: The fully qualified version of K3S to install, e.g. v1.20.0+k3s2. Look at the K3s releases for valid versions. Pre-releases are not supported by the installer.

For example, if you want to install Argo CD v1.7.11 with accompanying CLI on a Kubernetes 1.18.6 cluster, create the box as follows:

ARGOCD_VERSION=v1.7.11 ARGOCD_CLI_VERSION=v1.7.11 K3S_VERSION=v1.18.6+k3s1 vagrant up

Git repository with test data

In order to have some test cases ready to use with the new Argo CD environment, you can have the script automatically setup a Git repository server which serves a configurable repository clone. It can be activated by setting the following environment variable before running vagrant up:

GIT_ENABLED=true

The following environment variables control what is set up:

GIT_CLONE_REPO - the URL to a repository to clone. Defaults to the Argo CD example apps repository https://github.com/argoproj/argocd-example-apps
GIT_CHECKOUT - if set to true, will checkout the repository from the environment's own repository server (not the upstream repository) in the home directory of the vagrant user. You can then modify, commit and push from that local checkout without modifying upstream (to keep results initially predictable). Defaults to true.
GIT_CONNECT - if set to true, will connect the repository within Argo CD, so it's readily available to use. Defaults to true.

Variants

Variants are certain pre-configured installations of Argo CD that argocd-nutshell can provision for you.

A variant is specified by launching your box with ARGOCD_VARIANT set to the name of the variant you want to launch.

Single-Sign-On with GitHub

The variant sso sets up Argo CD pre-configured to do SSO with a GitHub org. You will need to setup a GitHub oauth app for this, that needs to match the following configuration:

The client ID, client secret and GitHub org name must be passed to the Vagrant provisioner like follows:

DEX_CLIENT_ID=<client_id> \
  DEX_CLIENT_SECRET=<client_secret> \
  DEX_GH_ORG_NAME=<name of your GH org> \
  ARGOCD_VARIANT=sso vagrant up

Customization

You can provision custom boxes by doing the following:

Create a new YAML configuration in the config directory. Have a look at config/default.yaml. Consider all variables mandatory. Be sure to change argocd.variant variable to the name of your new variant, for example myvariant.
The Argo CD manifests are rendered via Kustomize. Have a look at the variants/default directory for the default variant that is installed. It contains Kustomize resources to build the Argo CD manifests. You can copy its contents to a new folder with the same name as your new variant. Be aware that the Kustomize resources will be templated by Ansible, and cannot be rendered using kustomize as-is. To troubleshoot, use vagrant provision on changes, and find the final resources on the box within the /kustomize directory.
Set ARGOCD_VARIANT to the name of the new variant before running vagrant up, i.e.
```
ARGOCD_VARIANT=myvariant vagrant up
```

And then hope it will work out.

Status

This has just been born, and is not ready for general consumption. Feel free to use it in the default configuration. Expect to hack on it. It has lots and lots of rough edges and pitfalls.

YMMV.