FAQ

I’ve deleted/corrupted my repo and can’t delete my app.

Argo CD can’t delete an app if it cannot generate manifests. You need to either:

1. Reinstate/fix your repo.
2. Delete the app using --cascade=false and then manually deleting the resources.

Why is my application still OutOfSync immediately after a successful Sync?

See Diffing documentation for reasons resources can be OutOfSync, and ways to configure Argo CD to ignore fields when differences are expected.

Why is my application stuck in Progressing state?

Argo CD provides health for several standard Kubernetes types. The Ingress, StatefulSet and SealedSecret types have known issues which might cause health check to return Progressing state instead of Healthy.

• Ingress is considered healthy if status.loadBalancer.ingress list is non-empty, with at least one value for hostname or IP. Some ingress controllers (contour , traefik) don’t update status.loadBalancer.ingress field which causes Ingress to stuck in Progressing state forever.

• StatefulSet is considered healthy if value of status.updatedReplicas field matches to spec.replicas field. Due to Kubernetes bug kubernetes/kubernetes#68573 the status.updatedReplicas is not populated. So unless you run Kubernetes version which include the fix kubernetes/kubernetes#67570 StatefulSet might stay in Progressing state.

• Your StatefulSet or DaemonSet is using OnDelete instead of RollingUpdate strategy. See #1881.

• For SealedSecret, see Why are resources of type SealedSecret stuck in the Progressing state?

As workaround Argo CD allows providing health check customization which overrides default behavior.

I forgot the admin password, how do I reset it?

For Argo CD v1.8 and earlier, the initial password is set to the name of the server pod, as per the getting started guide. For Argo CD v1.9 and later, the initial password is available from a secret named argocd-initial-admin-secret.

To change the password, edit the argocd-secret secret and update the admin.password field with a new bcrypt hash.

Generating a bcrypt hash

Use a trustworthy, offline bcrypt implementation such as the Python bcrypt library to generate the hash.

pip3 install bcrypt
python3 -c "import bcrypt; print(bcrypt.hashpw(b'YOUR-PASSWORD-HERE', bcrypt.gensalt()).decode())"

To apply the new password hash, use the following command (replacing the hash with your own):

# bcrypt(password)=$2a$10$rRyBsGSHK6.uc8fntPwVIuLVHgsAhAX7TcdrqW/RADU0uh7CaChLa
kubectl -n argocd patch secret argocd-secret \
  -p '{"stringData": {
    "admin.password": "$2a$10$rRyBsGSHK6.uc8fntPwVIuLVHgsAhAX7TcdrqW/RADU0uh7CaChLa",
    "admin.passwordMtime": "'$(date +%FT%T%Z)'"
  }}'

Another option is to delete both the admin.password and admin.passwordMtime keys and restart argocd-server. This will generate a new password as per the getting started guide, so either to the name of the pod ( Argo CD 1.8 and earlier) or a randomly generated password stored in a secret (Argo CD 1.9 and later).

How to disable admin user?

Add admin.enabled: "false" to the argocd-cm ConfigMap ( see user management).

Argo CD cannot deploy Helm Chart based applications without internet access, how can I solve it?

Argo CD might fail to generate Helm chart manifests if the chart has dependencies located in external repositories. To solve the problem you need to make sure that requirements.yaml uses only internally available Helm repositories. Even if the chart uses only dependencies from internal repos Helm might decide to refresh stable repo. As workaround override stable repo URL in argocd-cm config map:

data:
  repositories: |
    - type: helm
      url: http://<internal-helm-repo-host>:8080
      name: stable

After deploying my Helm application with Argo CD I cannot see it with helm ls and other Helm commands

When deploying a Helm application Argo CD is using Helm only as a template mechanism. It runs helm template and then deploys the resulting manifests on the cluster instead of doing helm install. This means that you cannot use any Helm command to view/verify the application. It is fully managed by Argo CD. Note that Argo CD supports natively some capabilities that you might miss in Helm (such as the history and rollback commands).

This decision was made so that Argo CD is neutral to all manifest generators.

I’ve configured cluster secret but it does not show up in CLI/UI, how do I fix it?

Check if cluster secret has argocd.argoproj.io/secret-type: cluster label. If secret has the label but the cluster is still not visible then make sure it might be a permission issue. Try to list clusters using admin user ( e.g. argocd login --username admin && argocd cluster list).

Argo CD is unable to connect to my cluster, how do I troubleshoot it?

Use the following steps to reconstruct configured cluster config and connect to your cluster manually using kubectl:

kubectl exec -it <argocd-pod-name> bash # ssh into any argocd server pod
argocd admin cluster kubeconfig https://<cluster-url> /tmp/config --namespace argocd # generate your cluster config
KUBECONFIG=/tmp/config kubectl get pods # test connection manually

Now you can manually verify that cluster is accessible from the Argo CD pod.

How Can I Terminate A Sync?

To terminate the sync, click on the “synchronisation” then “terminate”:

Why Is My App Out Of Sync Even After Syncing?

In some cases, the tool you use may conflict with Argo CD by adding the app.kubernetes.io/instance label. E.g. using Kustomize common labels feature.

Argo CD automatically sets the app.kubernetes.io/instance label and uses it to determine which resources form the app. If the tool does this too, this causes confusion. You can change this label by setting the application.instanceLabelKey value in the argocd-cm. We recommend that you use argocd.argoproj.io/instance.

Note

When you make this change your applications will become out of sync and will need re-syncing.

See #1482.

How often does Argo CD check for changes to my Git or Helm repository ?

The default polling interval is 3 minutes (180 seconds). You can change the setting by updating the timeout.reconciliation value in the argocd-cm config map. If there are any Git changes, ArgoCD will only update applications with the auto-sync setting enabled. If you set it to 0 then Argo CD will stop polling Git repositories automatically and you can only use alternative methods such as webhooks and/or manual syncs for deploying applications.

Why Are My Resource Limits Out Of Sync?

Kubernetes has normalized your resource limits when they are applied, and then Argo CD has then compared the version in your generated manifests to the normalized one is Kubernetes - they won’t match.

E.g.

• '1000m' normalized to '1'
• '0.1' normalized to '100m'
• '3072Mi' normalized to '3Gi'
• 3072 normalized to '3072' (quotes added)

To fix this use diffing customizations settings.

How Do I Fix invalid cookie, longer than max length 4093?

Argo CD uses a JWT as the auth token. You likely are part of many groups and have gone over the 4KB limit which is set for cookies. You can get the list of groups by opening “developer tools -> network”

• Click log in
• Find the call to <argocd_instance>/auth/callback?code=<random_string>

Decode the token at https://jwt.io/. That will provide the list of teams that you can remove yourself from.

See #2165.

Why Am I Getting rpc error: code = Unavailable desc = transport is closing When Using The CLI?

Maybe you’re behind a proxy that does not support HTTP 2? Try the --grpc-web flag:

argocd ... --grpc-web

Why Am I Getting x509: certificate signed by unknown authority When Using The CLI?

The certificate created by default by Argo CD is not automatically recognised by the Argo CD CLI, in order to create a secure system you must follow the instructions to install a certificate and configure your client OS to trust that certificate.

If you’re not running in a production system (e.g. you’re testing Argo CD out), try the --insecure flag:

argocd ... --insecure

Do not use --insecure in production

I have configured Dex via dex.config in argocd-cm, it still says Dex is unconfigured. Why?

Most likely you forgot to set the url in argocd-cm to point to your ArgoCD as well. See also the docs.

Why are SealedSecret resources reporting a Status?

Versions of SealedSecret up to and including v0.15.0 (especially through helm 1.15.0-r3) don’t include a modern CRD and thus the status field will not be exposed (on k8s 1.16+). If your Kubernetes deployment is modern, ensure you’re using a fixed CRD if you want this feature to work at all.

Why are resources of type SealedSecret stuck in the Progressing state?

The controller of the SealedSecret resource may expose the status condition on resource it provisioned. Since version v2.0.0 ArgoCD picks up that status condition to derive a health status for the SealedSecret.

Versions before v0.15.0 of the SealedSecret controller are affected by an issue regarding this status conditions updates, which is why this feature is disabled by default in these versions. Status condition updates may be enabled by starting the SealedSecret controller with the --update-status command line parameter or by setting the SEALED_SECRETS_UPDATE_STATUS environment variable.

To disable ArgoCD from checking the status condition on SealedSecret resources, add the following resource customization in your argocd-cm ConfigMap via resource.customizations.health.<group_kind> key.

resource.customizations.health.bitnami.com_SealedSecret: |
  hs = {}
  hs.status = "Healthy"
  hs.message = "Controller doesn't report resource status"
  return hs

How do I fix The order in patch list … doesn't match $setElementOrder list: …?

An application may trigger a sync error labeled a ComparisonError with a message like:

The order in patch list: [map[name:KEY_BC value:150] map[name:KEY_BC value:500] map[name:KEY_BD value:250] map[name:KEY_BD value:500] map[name:KEY_BI value:something]] doesn’t match $setElementOrder list: [map[name:KEY_AA] map[name:KEY_AB] map[name:KEY_AC] map[name:KEY_AD] map[name:KEY_AE] map[name:KEY_AF] map[name:KEY_AG] map[name:KEY_AH] map[name:KEY_AI] map[name:KEY_AJ] map[name:KEY_AK] map[name:KEY_AL] map[name:KEY_AM] map[name:KEY_AN] map[name:KEY_AO] map[name:KEY_AP] map[name:KEY_AQ] map[name:KEY_AR] map[name:KEY_AS] map[name:KEY_AT] map[name:KEY_AU] map[name:KEY_AV] map[name:KEY_AW] map[name:KEY_AX] map[name:KEY_AY] map[name:KEY_AZ] map[name:KEY_BA] map[name:KEY_BB] map[name:KEY_BC] map[name:KEY_BD] map[name:KEY_BE] map[name:KEY_BF] map[name:KEY_BG] map[name:KEY_BH] map[name:KEY_BI] map[name:KEY_BC] map[name:KEY_BD]]

There are two parts to the message:

1. The order in patch list: [

   This identifies values for items, especially items that appear multiple times:

   map[name:KEY_BC value:150] map[name:KEY_BC value:500] map[name:KEY_BD value:250] map[name:KEY_BD value:500] map[name:KEY_BI value:something]

   You’ll want to identify the keys that are duplicated — you can focus on the first part, as each duplicated key will appear, once for each of its value with its value in the first list. The second list is really just

]

1. doesn't match $setElementOrder list: [

   This includes all of the keys. It’s included for debugging purposes — you don’t need to pay much attention to it. It will give you a hint about the precise location in the list for the duplicated keys:

   map[name:KEY_AA] map[name:KEY_AB] map[name:KEY_AC] map[name:KEY_AD] map[name:KEY_AE] map[name:KEY_AF] map[name:KEY_AG] map[name:KEY_AH] map[name:KEY_AI] map[name:KEY_AJ] map[name:KEY_AK] map[name:KEY_AL] map[name:KEY_AM] map[name:KEY_AN] map[name:KEY_AO] map[name:KEY_AP] map[name:KEY_AQ] map[name:KEY_AR] map[name:KEY_AS] map[name:KEY_AT] map[name:KEY_AU] map[name:KEY_AV] map[name:KEY_AW] map[name:KEY_AX] map[name:KEY_AY] map[name:KEY_AZ] map[name:KEY_BA] map[name:KEY_BB] map[name:KEY_BC] map[name:KEY_BD] map[name:KEY_BE] map[name:KEY_BF] map[name:KEY_BG] map[name:KEY_BH] map[name:KEY_BI] map[name:KEY_BC] map[name:KEY_BD]

]

In this case, the duplicated keys have been emphasized to help you identify the problematic keys. Many editors have the ability to highlight all instances of a string, using such an editor can help with such problems.

The most common instance of this error is with env: fields for containers.

Dynamic applications

It’s possible that your application is being generated by a tool in which case the duplication might not be evident within the scope of a single file. If you have trouble debugging this problem, consider filing a ticket to the owner of the generator tool asking them to improve its validation and error reporting.