Setup ArgoCD Locally

In many cases you find yourself testing things in local environments, whether it's scripts or workflows, you need a safe space to break things and learn.

ArgoCD is no exception, and while ArgoCD is native to Kubernetes, you don't need to spend money by running clusters in some cloud. I'll be using KinD to create a cluster on my laptop and install everything we need.

Introduction

We will use 2 repos: - Orangutan-infra - Will manage the infrastructure. - Orangutan - Will manage the configuration files.

Installation

Create Kubernetes Cluster

Create a cluster: kind create cluster --name playground You can run kubectl get nodes to make sure the control-plane is running.

Preparing The Files

We'll use Terraform to install ArgoCD. We'll utilize Terraform's Helm provider to install ArgoCD instead of directly applying the chart on our cluster.

Before installing the Helm chart, you can run helm search repo argocd to search for the chart:

Note

You can run helm show values argo/argo-cd > argo-default-values.yaml to export the default values of the chart. It's helpful when you want to see what values exist for each chart before deploying it.

In orangutan-infra I'll create the following folders and files:

└── terraform
    └── argocd
        ├── 0-provider.tf
        ├── 1-argocd.tf
        └── values
            └── argocd.yaml

For our values file argocd.yaml, we'll pass the following:

---
server:
  extraArgs:
    - --insecure

--insecure will serve our UI on HTTP.

`0-provider.tf`

We'll configure Helm as our provider and pass ~/.kube/config to use the local cluster we created:

provider "helm" {
  kubernetes {
    config_path = "~/.kube/config"
  }
}

`1-argocd.tf`

For the Helm installation, we'll use the the following block:

resource "helm_release" "argocd" {
  name = "argocd"

  repository       = "https://argoproj.github.io/argo-helm"
  chart            = "argo-cd"
  namespace        = "argocd"
  create_namespace = true

  values = [file("values/argocd.yaml")]
}

Installing ArgoCD

Run terraform init to initialize Terraform. If it was successful, you should see the following output:
We're ready to run terraform apply. If we did everything correctly, the output will show us the resources that we're deploying. Enter yes and wait for ArgoCD to finish installing.
If all went well, you should be able to see our pods are in Running state:

Tip

You can run helm status argocd -n argocd to follow the deployment status:

Accessing ArgoCD

We need to port forward the Argo Server in order to access it:
Go to http://localhost:8080. You'll need to enter a username and password. By default, the username is admin. To get the password, we'll need to first fetch the secret that Argo created in our cluster:
```
k get secrets argocd-initial-admin-secret -oyaml -n argocd
```
The password is base64 encrypted. Let's decrypt it (don't copy the % char, it just states the end of the string):
Login to Argo's UI and change your password

That's it, you successfully installed ArgoCD locally ✅