Force refresh of all apps

[svend]

What is the best way to ensure that all applications are refreshed?

After adding a label to ignoreDifferences most apps still showed OutOfSync. Manually syncing all of them is tedious, so I tried doing a rolling restart of the ArgoCD components, including the server, application-controller, and redis, but I couldn't clear the app cache.

(We have application-controller's --app-resync set to 1 hour, so the apps should eventually refresh.)

[jannfis]

Hey @svend,

I would assume that - since ignoreDifferences will affect the reconciliation state of your apps independently of your source manifests - a refresh of the source manifests is not required for this setting to get effect. Usually, it just adapts the diffing once you changed the settings. So, maybe, the ignoreDifferences is not targeting the resources that you would expect it to.

However, to answer your question: You can use a hard refresh of any application to force rebuilding the manifests from source. This can be either done using the CLI (argocd app get --hard-refresh <appname>), the UI (via the dropdown on the "Refresh" button in the application details view) or by sticking the annotation argocd.argoproj.io/refresh: hard on an Application CR in your cluster.

For targeting multiple applications with the CLI, you could use a small script like the following, given that you have also jq installed. Below example targets all apps associated to AppProject default:

for app in $(argocd app list -p default -o json | jq -r .[].metadata.name); do argocd app get --hard-refresh $app; done