Chainguard Image for argocd

Argo CD is a declarative continuous deployment tool for Kubernetes.

Chainguard Images are regularly-updated, minimal container images with low-to-zero CVEs.

Download this Image

This image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/argocd:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard registry.

Usage

There are two recommended methods for installing Argo CD: using helm and raw manifests. Chainguard's Argo CD Image is designed to be a drop-in replacement for either method.

To use this Image, replace the appropriate image: value with the Chainguard Argo CD Image. The following is an example how such a value might appear within a Helm chart:

global:
  image:
    repository: cgr.dev/chainguard/argocd

Based on these values, you would install Argo CD using the following helm commands. First, add the Argo Helm repository:

helm repo add argo https://argoproj.github.io/argo-helm

Then you can install Argo CD:

helm install argocd argo/argo-cd \
	--namespace argocd \
	--create-namespace \
	--set global.image.repository="cgr.dev/chainguard/argocd" \
	--set global.image.tag="latest" \
	--set repoServer.image.repository="cgr.dev/chainguard/argocd-repo-server" \
	--set repoServer.image.tag="latest"

Note that this example uses multiple container images, namely argocd and argocd-repo-server. Refer to the following components section for more information.

NOTE: Setting the tag to latest is not recommended, and only shown for illustrative purposes.

Optionally, you can use other Chainguard Images to replace Argo CD dependencies:

redis:
  image:
    repository: cgr.dev/chainguard/redis
    tag: latest

dex:
  image:
    repository: cgr.dev/chainguard/dex
    tag: latest

Argo CD Components

Argo CD is comprised of multiple components that all share the same container image.

Keeping in line with the philosophy of minimal dependencies in Chainguard Images, we chose to split this up to keep the number of packages in each respective component to a minimum. This means the overall number of images increases, but the size and complexity of each image is reduced down to the minimum needed to function.

Contact Support

If you have a Zendesk account (typically set up for you by your Customer Success Manager) you can reach out to Chainguard's Customer Success team through our Zendesk portal.

What are Chainguard Images?

Chainguard Images are a collection of container images designed for security and minimalism.

Many Chainguard Images are distroless; they contain only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These images do not even contain a shell or package manager. Chainguard Images are built with Wolfi, our Linux undistro designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Images include:

• Minimal design, with no unnecessary software bloat
• Automated nightly builds to ensure Images are completely up-to-date and contain all available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs (software bills of materials) attesting the provenance of all artifacts within the Image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

-dev Variants

As mentioned previously, Chainguard’s distroless Images have no shell or package manager by default. This is great for security, but sometimes you need these things, especially in builder images. For those cases, most (but not all) Chainguard Images come paired with a -dev variant which does include a shell and package manager.

Although the -dev image variants have similar security features as their distroless versions, such as complete SBOMs and signatures, they feature additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. The general recommendation is to use the -dev variants only to build the application and then copy all application artifacts into a distroless image, which will result in a final container image that has a minimal attack surface and won’t allow package installations or logins.

That being said, it’s worth noting that -dev variants of Chainguard Images are completely fine to run in production environments. After all, the -dev variants are still more secure than many popular container images based on fully-featured operating systems such as Debian and Ubuntu since they carry less software, follow a more frequent patch cadence, and offer attestations for what they include.

Learn More

To better understand how to work with Chainguard Images, we encourage you to visit Chainguard Academy, our documentation and education platform.