Manage third-party helm app using ArgoCD

[slavafomin]

Hello!

First of all, thank you for this great tool!

However, I would like to install and manage a third-party helm application using ArgoCD with the ability to define helm customization values in my Git repository (source of truth for ArgoCD). How should I do it?

I'm using the same pattern using Kustomize and it works great. Here's the Kustomize example of how I manage the ArgoCD iteself:

apiVersion: kustomize.config.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Kustomization

namespace: argocd

resources:
  - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/argoproj/argo-cd/master/manifests/install.yaml
  - resources/applications/app-of-apps.yaml
  - resources/server/ingress.yaml

patches:
  - resources/config-map/config-map.patch.yaml
  - resources/server/service.patch.yaml

Is it possible to do the same with Helm?

Thanks!

[chetan-rns]

Hi @slavafomin, Argo CD supports custom values file with helm https://argoproj.github.io/argo-cd/user-guide/helm/#values-files
One way to achieve this is by creating an empty helm chart in the Git repository that considers your third-party helm chart as a dependency. Include a values.yaml to define the customization values. And then point the Argo CD application to this repository.

example: https://github.com/argoproj/argocd-example-apps/tree/master/helm-dependency

[slavafomin]

Thank you @chetan-rns for a suggestion!

I actually tried this approach and it works to an extend. However, all resources created for a dependency is getting random suffixes assigned to their names. I'm guessing Helm does this to prevent conflicts. Do you think this could be averted somehow?

[chetan-rns]

Not sure if Helm can handle conflicts. Is the release name being assigned as suffix/prefix somewhere? Using --generate-name also adds a unique prefix