RBAC Configuration

The RBAC feature enables restriction of access to Argo CD resources. Argo CD does not have its own user management system and has only one built-in user admin. The admin user is a superuser and it has unrestricted access to the system. RBAC requires SSO configuration or one or more local users setup. Once SSO or local users are configured, additional RBAC roles can be defined, and SSO groups or local users can man be mapped to roles.

Basic Built-in Roles

Argo CD has two pre-defined roles but RBAC configuration allows defining roles and groups (see below).

  • role:readonly - read-only access to all resources
  • role:admin - unrestricted access to all resources

These default built-in role definitions can be seen in builtin-policy.csv

RBAC Permission Structure

Breaking down the permissions definition differs slightly between applications and every other resource type in Argo CD.

  • All resources except applications permissions (see next bullet):

    p, <role/user/group>, <resource>, <action>, <object>

  • Applications (which belong to an AppProject):

    p, <role/user/group>, <resource>, <action>, <appproject>/<object>

RBAC Resources and Actions

Resources: clusters, projects, applications, repositories, certificates, accounts, gpgkeys

Actions: get, create, update, delete, sync, override, action

Tying It All Together

Additional roles and groups can be configured in argocd-rbac-cm ConfigMap. The example below configures a custom role, named org-admin. The role is assigned to any user which belongs to your-github-org:your-team group. All other users get the default policy of role:readonly, which cannot modify Argo CD settings.

ArgoCD ConfigMap argocd-rbac-cm Example:

  1. apiVersion: v1
  2. kind: ConfigMap
  3. metadata:
  4.   name: argocd-rbac-cm
  5.   namespace: argocd
  6. data:
  7.   policy.default: role:readonly
  8.   policy.csv: |
  9.     p, role:org-admin, applications, *, */*, allow
  10.     p, role:org-admin, clusters, get, *, allow
  11.     p, role:org-admin, repositories, get, *, allow
  12.     p, role:org-admin, repositories, create, *, allow
  13.     p, role:org-admin, repositories, update, *, allow
  14.     p, role:org-admin, repositories, delete, *, allow
  16.     g, your-github-org:your-team, role:org-admin

Another policy.csv example might look as follows:

  1. p, role:staging-db-admins, applications, create, staging-db-admins/*, allow
  2. p, role:staging-db-admins, applications, delete, staging-db-admins/*, allow
  3. p, role:staging-db-admins, applications, get, staging-db-admins/*, allow
  4. p, role:staging-db-admins, applications, override, staging-db-admins/*, allow
  5. p, role:staging-db-admins, applications, sync, staging-db-admins/*, allow
  6. p, role:staging-db-admins, applications, update, staging-db-admins/*, allow
  7. p, role:staging-db-admins, projects, get, staging-db-admins, allow
  8. g, db-admins, role:staging-db-admins

This example defines a role called staging-db-admins with seven permissions that allow that role to perform the actions (create/delete/get/override/sync/update applications, and get appprojects) against * (all) objects in the staging-db-admins Argo CD AppProject.

Anonymous Access

The anonymous access to Argo CD can be enabled using users.anonymous.enabled field in argocd-cm (see argocd-cm.yaml). The anonymous users get default role permissions specified by policy.default in argocd-rbac-cm.yaml. For read-only access you’ll want policy.default: role:readonly as above