Is there a way to have a global variable used for Application's spec.source.repoURL?

[gaeljw]

Considering we have many Applications and they all refer to the same Git host. Would there be a way to set this Git host in some kind of variable that would be substituted by ArgoCD when reading the Application definition?

Unless I missed something in the documentation, I don't think it's possible for now, right?

That is, instead of having a few apps declared like this:

apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1
kind: Application
...
spec:
  source:
    repoURL: https://github.com/myorg/project1.git
---
apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1
kind: Application
...
spec:
  source:
    repoURL: https://github.com/myorg/project2.git

We would have the following and $MY_ORG_SERVER would be replaced by ArgoCD:

apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1
kind: Application
...
spec:
  source:
    repoURL: $MY_ORG_SERVER/project1.git
---
apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1
kind: Application
...
spec:
  source:
    repoURL: $MY_ORG_SERVER/project2.git

The use case for this is to ease migration from one server to another (think GitHub to GitLab for instance) without having to change all Application manifests.

Ideally, this would also apply to other places where the server is referenced like in ApplicationSet or AppProject.

[crenshaw-dev]

No such mechanism exists.

I'd recommend managing your Application manifests via GitOps so that an update is a simple find/replace.

If you can't GitOps the manifests, you could wrap the Application CRD in your own MyOrgApplication CRD and use a controller to inject whatever values you like.

[gaeljw]

Thanks @crenshaw-dev. The App manifests are already GitOps-ed, so indeed a find/replace will probably do the trick as long as we don't have them in many repos. For now it's the case and I guess it's somehow best practices to have them in a single "admin/ops" repo anyway.

[dmouse]

@gaeljw a work around that I used is using the ApplicationSet generator and define the repository base path as part of a generator list to create this kind of configuration.

[gaeljw]

Interesting. In my case I think it would add too much indirection (we already have AppSet + App of Apps with 2 inception levels 😅) and confuse people but could be used in some cases indeed.