Skip to content

Development and Maintenance Guide📜

Table of Contents

This wrapper chart is based on the argo-cd helm chart maintained by ArgoCD, however it is renamed to argocd in Big Bang. You can override values in the ArgoCD chart by using the upstream heading. See dev-overrides.yaml for an example.

There are certain integrations within the bigbang ecosystem and this package that require additional testing outside of the specific package tests ran during CI. This is a requirement when files within those integrations are changed, as to avoid causing breaks up through the bigbang umbrella. Currently, these include changes to the istio implementation within argocd (see: istio templates, network policy templates, service entry templates).

Upgrading to a new version📜

The below details the steps required to update to a new version of the Argocd package. If you are performing a renovate, renovatebot may have performed most of these steps for you.

  1. Review the upstream release notes for the update you are going to perform, as well as any versions skipped over between the last BB release and this one. Note any breaking changes and new features.

  2. Modify the version in Chart.yaml. Also modify the appVersion and the bigbang.dev/applicationVersions to the new upstream version of Argocd. Also confirm any additional dependency updates are in place in the Chart.yaml.

  3. Once you have configured the Chart.yaml with the proper versions (or validated from renovate changes), use helm dependency update chart/ from the root of the repo to pull the new version of the upstream argocd chart, as well as any dependencies into the chart/charts/ directory.

  4. Update CHANGELOG.md adding an entry for the new version and noting all changes (at minimum should include Updated Argocd to x.x.x).

  5. Generate the README.md updates by following the guide in gluon.

  6. Open an MR in “Draft” status and validate that CI passes. This will perform a number of smoke tests against the package, but it is good to manually deploy to test some things that CI doesn’t. Follow the Testing for updates steps below for manual testing.

  7. Once all manual testing is complete take your MR out of “Draft” status and add the review label. Be sure to include screenshots of a successful deployment in kubernetes, as well as a screenshot of the application loaded in the browser.

Testing for updates📜

NOTE: For these testing steps it is good to do them on both a clean install and an upgrade. For clean install, point argocd to your branch. For an upgrade do an install with argocd pointing to the latest tag, then perform a helm upgrade with argocd pointing to your branch.

You will want to install with:

  • Istio enabled
  • Argocd enabled
  • Set admin password for testing determinism (this sets password to Password123)

This can be accomplished by using the overrides listed in dev-overrides.yaml

Testing Steps📜

  1. Deploy a Big Bang cluster by following the quickstart guide, including dev-overrides.yaml in your deployment.

  2. Check to ensure the helm chart has deployed successfully

    kubectl get helmrelease argocd -n bigbang

    The READY column should be True and the STATUS should state the Helm install succeeded

    NAME     AGE     READY   STATUS
argocd   3h26m   True    Helm install succeeded for release argocd/argocd-argocd.v1 with chart argocd@8.5.8-bb.2

  3. Ensure the application is resolvable by visiting argocd.dev.bigbang.mil

  4. Run the cypress tests to confirm functionality of adding and deleting an application via the UI

    1. Follow the Cypress Installation Documentation to install Cypress on your local machine

    2. Navigate to /chart/tests and run cypress using the devmaint.config.js configuration file. This file includes default overrides necessary for Cypress to run properly on your local machine.

    cd chart/tests/

cypress run --config-file cypress/config/devmaint.config.js
    1. After reviewing the log output and validating the test was successful, navigate to /chart/tests/cypress/videos to view the test video. If you are performing these steps as part of a renovate, attach this video to your MR.

When in doubt with any testing or upgrade steps ask one of the CODEOWNERS for assistance.

Testing with monitoring📜

You can test with monitoring by uncommenting the server: section in dev-overrides.yaml. Metrics for each component must be enabled, and you can do so by uncommenting each section to enable it.

Once deployed, you can validate that metrics are working by visiting Prometheus and running the following query

  argocd_info

The resulting output should look similar to the following:

argocd_info{container="server", endpoint="http-metrics", instance="10.42.2.33:8083", job="argocd-argocd-server-metrics", namespace="argocd", pod="argocd-argocd-server-8d8db9f5c-xzld4", service="argocd-argocd-server-metrics", version="v3.1.8+becb020"}

This confirms that metrics are flowing into Prometheus, and can be used to build dashboards in Grafana.

Deploying with Keycloak📜

When deploying with Keycloak, it is strongly recommended to use Keycloak’s Testing Environment Setup instructions to create a working keycloak environment. Additionally, you will want to uncomment the OIDC Parameters in dev-overrides.yaml to configure the keycloak integration with ArgoCD