Moving to ArgoCD: An App-of-Apps, and the Bug That Taught Me How Helm Rendering Works

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:00:00 -0600

Homelab Kubernetes Series: 1. Intro · 2. Installation · 3. Configuration · 4. Networking · 5. Storage · 6. Workloads · 7. ArgoCD · 8. GitOps

Recap

Everything up through the last post got onto the cluster the same way: kubectl apply -f, from whichever terminal I happened to have open, applied in whatever order I remembered to run things. That works right up until it doesn’t. This post is about why I moved to ArgoCD, and a bug in my own setup that I didn’t catch for months.

Why kubectl apply stopped being enough

A few things pushed me here. There was no record of what was actually deployed versus what I’d only ever run once from history. There was no reconciliation — if something drifted from the manifest, or someone (me, running a one-off kubectl edit) changed it directly, nothing would ever notice or fix it. And there was no single place to look and answer “is the cluster in the state I think it’s in.” GitOps fixes all three: git is the source of truth, and a controller in the cluster keeps reality in sync with it.

I followed Micah Bird’s homelab ArgoCD guide as the starting pattern, in a separate repo from the workload manifests themselves.

Installing ArgoCD, and having it manage itself

ArgoCD is installed as a small Helm wrapper chart around the upstream argo-helm chart:

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apiVersion: v2
name: argo-cd
version: 3.2.1
dependencies:
 - name: argo-cd
 version: 9.1.7
 repository: https://argoproj.github.io/argo-helm

The interesting part isn’t the install itself, it’s what happens right after: ArgoCD manages its own upgrade going forward, as just another Application pointed at that same chart path in the same repo. Once it’s up, I don’t run helm upgrade by hand anymore. I bump the version in git and let ArgoCD reconcile itself.

Ingress needed one non-obvious detail. ArgoCD’s UI and CLI both talk gRPC, which doesn’t play nicely with a plain HTTP-routed IngressRoute, so the route needs a second, higher-priority rule specifically for gRPC traffic, upgraded to h2c:

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- kind: Rule
 match: Host(`argocd.joeyaxtell.com`) && Header(`Content-Type`, `application/grpc`)
 priority: 11
 services:
 - name: argo-cd-argocd-server
 port: 80
 scheme: h2c

Without that, the web UI loads fine but the CLI and any gRPC-based calls fail in confusing ways.

App-of-apps

The pattern I landed on is the classic app-of-apps: one root Application watches a directory in git, and every file in that directory becomes another Application that ArgoCD manages:

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spec:
 source:
 repoURL: https://github.com/path-to-my-argo-cd-repo.git
 path: apps/
 targetRevision: HEAD
 syncPolicy:
 automated:
 prune: true
 allowEmpty: true
 selfHeal: true

Add a workload, add one small Application file describing where its manifests live and where it should be deployed, and ArgoCD picks it up automatically. Each one follows the same shape: point at a path in my homelab-kubernetes repo, sync automatically, prune anything removed, and self-heal anything that drifts.

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spec:
 source:
 repoURL: https://github.com/path-to-my-k8-manifest-repo.git
 targetRevision: HEAD
 path: media/<app>/
 directory:
 recurse: true
 syncPolicy:
 automated:
 prune: true
 selfHeal: true
 ignoreDifferences:
 - group: apps
 kind: Deployment
 jsonPointers: [/spec/replicas]

That last bit, ignoreDifferences on replica count, exists so that if I manually scale something down for maintenance, ArgoCD’s self-heal doesn’t immediately scale it back up and fight me.

The bug: not every Application file is actually an Application

Here’s the one I didn’t catch for a while, and I think it’s a genuinely useful lesson about how Helm rendering works. My apps/ directory is itself a Helm chart — it has a Chart.yaml — which means ArgoCD renders it as a Helm chart. Helm has a rule I hadn’t fully internalized: only files under templates/ get rendered as manifests. Anything sitting at the chart root is just a file Helm can reference via .Files, but it never gets emitted.

I had new workload Applications sitting at the chart root instead of inside templates/. They were valid YAML, they were committed to git, and the root app-of-apps Application showed as Synced at the exact commit that added them. Every signal you’d normally trust said everything was fine. But because they weren’t inside templates/, Helm silently never rendered them, and they never became real ArgoCD Applications. The workloads they described only exist in my cluster today because I kubectl apply’d them by hand at some point. GitOps for those apps is, right now, an illusion. If I’d edited that file in git expecting a sync to follow, nothing would have happened, because ArgoCD never rendered it as anything to sync.

The fix is a one-line move — apps/pihole.yml becomes apps/templates/pihole.yml — and it’s on my list. I’m leaving the mistake in this post instead of quietly writing around it, because “the sync status looked healthy and I was still wrong” is exactly the kind of thing worth knowing to check for.

Secrets and private repos

ArgoCD needs credentials to pull from a private GitHub repo, which it gets from an ordinary Secret carrying one special label:

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metadata:
 labels:
 argocd.argoproj.io/secret-type: repository
stringData:
 type: git
 url: https://github.com/[GITHUB_REPO_HERE]
 username: [GITHUB USERNAME HERE]
 password: [GITHUB PAT TOKEN HERE]

That label is what tells ArgoCD to treat this Secret as repository credentials rather than just an opaque Secret sitting in the namespace. The real values are created out-of-band, the same way the Cloudflare token was in the configuration post — the committed file is a template, never a credential.

Up next

Getting ArgoCD installed is one thing; actually leveraging it day to day is another. The next post covers what’s really running through it today, what I tried and had to walk back, and where the gaps still are.

◀ Previous: 6. Workloads | Next ▶: 8. GitOps

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