New Release for Argo Image Updater — 0.13

We are pleased to announce a brand new release of Argo Image updater. The project also has new maintainers. Read on for more details.

Argo Image updater is a companion controller to Argo CD. You can use it to automatically monitor your container registries and instruct your applications to perform a redeployment when a new version of a container is available. This means that you can gain the benefits of continuous delivery without the need of custom pipelines for updating your Kubernetes manifests

This release includes 5 new features, 12 fixes and several documentation updates. Here are some highlights:

Support for Argo CD multi-source applications

Using multiple sources in an Argo CD application was one of the most requested feature by Helm users. Multi source applications allow you to define an external Helm chart from a Helm repository while still referencing your own local values from a Git repository.

With this new release Argo Image updater now supports updating images in values of multi-source applications. This feature will be very useful for teams that use off-the-self Helm charts in conjunction with Argo image updater

Thanks David Vidal Villamide (Virtual Cave S.L.) for implementing this feature.

Specify write-back Git repository as annotation

A very common scenario for Helm users is the usage of Image updater for Helm charts that are stored in a Helm repository and not in Git. Simply monitoring the Helm chart for new versions works fine, but using the write-back feature of Image updater would fail, as Image updater didn’t understand that the Helm start is not stored in Git.

Now there is a new annotation argocd-image-updater.argoproj.io/git-repository where you can define explicitly what Git repository will be used for the write-back feature. This is very powerful as not only solves the issue with Helm charts outside of Git, but allows you to decouple the Git repository of the manifests with the Git repository for the write-back action.

Thanks Florin Hillebrand (Anyline) for implementing this feature.

Respect original parameter overrides during Git write-back

Yet another important feature in the case of writing back parameter overrides is respecting the existing ones. Previously if a user had custom Image updater values in the .argocd-source.yaml those would be lost on the next write-back action.

With this new release Argo Image updater behaves in the expected way and keeps all the existing overrides before adding the new ones. Thus a single file now contains both user defined values and the ones from Image updater.

Thanks KS. Yim (Line Engineering) for implementing this feature.

Added support for separate GitHub credentials

If you want to use Argo Image updater with Github you now have an additional way of specifying the Git credentials. In addition to using username/password you can now also use GitHub app credentials

For more information about this type of authentication see the official documentation at GitHub.

Thanks Dustin Lactin (Mozilla) for implementing this feature.

Renamed confusing update strategies

Argo Image updater has several different strategies for monitoring container images and deciding if a new version is considered “new” or not.

The strategy “latest” is now renamed to “newest-build” which explains better the intent as “latest” is already an overloaded term in the Kubernetes world.

The strategy “name’ is now renamed to “alphabetical” which again makes it clear how it works. Note that at the time of writing the previous names continue to work, but you are encouraged to upgrade to the new names as in the future they will be the only ones that will be valid.

Thanks Jaideep Rao (Red Hat) for implementing this feature.

Where to report issues with the release

This release of Argo Image updater was led by Argo maintainer Pasha from Codefresh (now part of Octopus Deploy).

What does this mean for the future of Argo Image Updater?

In the coming months we will work to improve the release process so that we can support more frequent releases. We will also be incorporating features submitted by the community. Finally we will review pull requests on a best-effort basis.

If you would like to contribute new features to Argo Image Updater, please submit a pull request as usual.

If you find any issues with the release or you are interested in becoming a maintainer, please contact us on the #argo-cd-image-updater channel in the CNCF Slack instance.

Happy deployments!

Photo by Pawel Janiak on Unsplash