How to Setup and Connect ArgoCD with AKS in 5 mins¶

Gulcan Topcu

March 19, 2024

5 min read

🏷️Tagged with:

ArgoCD is a powerful tool that utilizes GitOps principles to automate and streamline your Kubernetes application deployments. It continuously monitors your Git repository, acting as the single source of truth for your desired application state. When it detects a change, ArgoCD controller automatically reconciles the running applications with the configurations in your Git repository, ensuring a consistent and version-controlled deployment process.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through setting up ArgoCD on your AKS cluster to manage deployments of Python applications stored in a private registry. While the demo uses a python flask deployment and service file for illustrative purposes (ingress, external DNS and cert manager is on the way!), you can easily substitute it with the NGINX application manifests on our repo. The deployment YAML for NGINX is provided in kuberada labs repo for reference, you can find the nginx manifest files there.

All the codes used:

ArgoCD Gist

Manifest and terraform files:

Files

Let’s dive in!

Prerequisites:

An existing Azure subscription with AKS cluster creation permissions
Azure CLI installed and configured with your subscription
kubectl configured to access your AKS cluster
Basic understanding of Kubernetes concepts

Creating the AKS Cluster:

If you don’t have an AKS cluster, you can create one using the Azure CLI or terraform. Refer to Microsoft’s documentation for detailed instructions.

While this guide focuses on deploying ArgoCD on an existing AKS cluster, you can spin up a minikube, k3d cluster too. If you don’t have one, you can easily create one using the Azure CLI or the terraform code we store on https://github.com/colossus06/Kuberada-Blog-Labs/tree/main/argocd.

AKS Cluster Created

Installing ArgoCD on AKS¶

Download the ArgoCD Manifest¶

Start by downloading the ArgoCD manifest file from the ArgoCD repository.

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/argoproj/argo-cd/stable/manifests/install.yaml

Configure ArgoCD¶

Rename the install.yaml file to argo-cm-nodeport.yaml and configure ArgoCD for your environment:

Disable TLS and configure insecure connection:
```
data:
  server.insecure: "true"
```
Change the argocd-server service type to NodePort:
```
spec:
  type: NodePort
```

Connect SCM and ArgoCD¶

Since we are using a private repo, we need to create a secret to authenticate with your private Git repository. If you’re using the sample nginx manifest file, you can safely skip this step.

Deploy ArgoCD¶

Apply the modified argo-cm-nodeport.yaml file and the secret to deploy ArgoCD:

Installed ArgoCD

Access the ArgoCD UI¶

Open the ArgoCD UI using port forwarding:

kubectl port-forward svc/argocd-server -n argocd 8080:443

Access the UI at http://localhost:8080 and log in with the default username admin and password you get with following the gist.

ArgoCD UI

Validation¶

As you can see, repo and application is already setup and the status is healthy. We didn’t interact with the cluster directly instead delegated out github repo as the single source of truth.