Argo CD has the ability to automatically sync an application when it detects differences between the desired manifests in Git, and the live state in the cluster. A benefit of automatic sync is that CI/CD pipelines no longer need direct access to the Argo CD API server to perform the deployment. Instead, the pipeline makes a commit and push to the Git repository with the changes to the manifests in the tracking Git repo.
To configure automated sync run:
argocd app set <APPNAME> --sync-policy automated
Alternatively, if creating the application an application manifest, specify a syncPolicy with an
automated
policy.
spec:
syncPolicy:
automated: {}
Application CRD now also support explicitly setting automated sync to be turned on or off by using spec.syncPolicy.automated.enabled
flag to true or false. When enable
field is set to true, Automated Sync is active and when set to false controller will skip automated sync even if prune
, self-heal
and allowEmpty
are set.
spec:
syncPolicy:
automated:
enabled: true
!!!note
Setting the spec.syncPolicy.automated.enabled
flag to null will be treated as if automated sync is enabled. When the enabled
field is set to false, fields like prune
, selfHeal
and allowEmpty
can be set without enabling them.
For a standalone application, toggling auto-sync is performed by changing the application's spec.syncPolicy.automated
field. For an ApplicationSet managed application, changing the application's spec.syncPolicy.automated
field will, however, have no effect.
Read more details about how to perform the toggling for applications managed by ApplicationSets here.
By default (and as a safety mechanism), automated sync will not delete resources when Argo CD detects the resource is no longer defined in Git. To prune the resources, a manual sync can always be performed (with pruning checked). Pruning can also be enabled to happen automatically as part of the automated sync by running:
argocd app set <APPNAME> --auto-prune
Or by setting the prune option to true in the automated sync policy:
spec:
syncPolicy:
automated:
prune: true
By default (and as a safety mechanism), automated sync with prune have a protection from any automation/human errors when there are no target resources. It prevents application from having empty resources. To allow applications have empty resources, run:
argocd app set <APPNAME> --allow-empty
Or by setting the allow empty option to true in the automated sync policy:
spec:
syncPolicy:
automated:
prune: true
allowEmpty: true
By default, changes that are made to the live cluster will not trigger automated sync. To enable automatic sync when the live cluster's state deviates from the state defined in Git, run:
argocd app set <APPNAME> --self-heal
Or by setting the self-heal option to true in the automated sync policy:
spec:
syncPolicy:
automated:
selfHeal: true
Disabling self-heal does not guarantee that live cluster changes won't be reverted in multi-source applications. Even if a resource's source remains unchanged, changes in one of the sources can trigger autosync
. To handle such cases, consider disabling autosync
.
-
An automated sync will only be performed if the application is OutOfSync. Applications in a Synced or error state will not attempt automated sync.
-
Automated sync will only attempt one synchronization per unique combination of commit SHA1 and application parameters. If the most recent successful sync in the history was already performed against the same commit-SHA and parameters, a second sync will not be attempted, unless
selfHeal
flag is set to true. -
If the
selfHeal
flag is set to true, then the sync will be attempted again after self-heal timeout (5 seconds by default) which is controlled by--self-heal-timeout-seconds
flag ofargocd-application-controller
deployment. -
Automatic sync will not reattempt a sync if the previous sync attempt against the same commit-SHA and parameters had failed.
-
Rollback cannot be performed against an application with automated sync enabled.
-
The automatic sync interval is determined by the
timeout.reconciliation
value in theargocd-cm
ConfigMap, which defaults to120s
with added jitter of60s
for a maximum period of 3 minutes.