A step-by-step ArgoCD demo for beginners (PART 1)

ArgoCD is a declarative GitOps continuous delivery tool built to deploy applications to Kubernetes. The goal of this demo is to install ArgoCD in a Kubernetes cluster and try out a few of its features.

Requirements:

• Minikube
• kubectl
• kubeconfig (Minikube creates it automatically in ~/.kube/config)

I will be following the ArgoCD getting started guide for the initial steps.

1. Start the Minikube Kubernetes Cluster and Install ArgoCD

Start the Cluster

minikube start

Then install ArgoCD

kubectl create namespace argocd
kubectl apply -n argocd -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/argoproj/argo-cd/stable/manifests/install.yaml

Finally, check the pods in argocd namespace are running

k get pods -n argocd

NAMESPACE     NAME                                                READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
argocd        argocd-application-controller-0                     1/1     Running   2          7h3m
argocd        argocd-applicationset-controller-66689cbf4b-wpg2t   1/1     Running   2          7h3m
argocd        argocd-dex-server-7f444984f8-hxsjr                  1/1     Running   1          7h3m
argocd        argocd-notifications-controller-5f9b867666-dcdzh    1/1     Running   1          7h3m
argocd        argocd-redis-584f4df7d7-jjw5h                       1/1     Running   1          7h3m
argocd        argocd-repo-server-69c7dd7c9-f8828                  1/1     Running   1          7h3m
argocd        argocd-server-c6c9c4996-t89fw                       1/1     Running   1          7h3m

2. Download ArgoCD CLI

sudo curl -sSL -o /usr/local/bin/argocd \
https://github.com/argoproj/argo-cd/releases/latest/download/argocd-linux-amd64
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/argocd

Check if the argocd binary is working by running

argocd version

3. Access The ArgoCD API Server

The documentation states that one can expose ArgoCD API server with a service type Load Balancer, Ingress or Port Forwarding. Since we are using a local tool such as Minikube, I’ll pick port-forwarding which won’t expose the server per se, but it will allow me to connect to it on localhost:8080 on the browser.

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

You can now visit localhost:8080 and it should display the following

The password for the initial admin account is stored as a secret named argocd-initial-admin-secret in the ArgoCD namespace. To check that secret run

k get secrets -n argocd argocd-initial-admin-secret -o yaml

In my cluster I get

apiVersion: v1
data:
  password: NmFZd29tUFk1ZHltUm1vUA==
kind: Secret
metadata:
  creationTimestamp: "2022-05-13T14:07:08Z"
  name: argocd-initial-admin-secret
  namespace: argocd
  resourceVersion: "974"
  uid: ca35767f-8b6b-4f33-9022-047aa6f6fcc1
type: Opaque

The secret is base-64 encoded so to get it and decode it I can run

kubectl -n argocd get secret argocd-initial-admin-secret \
-o jsonpath="{.data.password}" | base64 -d; echo
6aYwomPY5dymRmoP

With this password, I can now login into my account’s empty dashboard.

Don’t forget to delete the Kubernetes secret argocd-initial-admin-secret and store the password in a safe location.

So far so good, let’s continue on part 2 of this series.