argocd-agent

packaged by Chainguard

Chainguard Container for argocd-agent

argocd-agent extends Argo CD to orchestrate GitOps delivery across many managed clusters via a principal (hub) and agent (spoke) control plane over mTLS.

Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.

Download this Container Image

For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/argocd-agent:latest

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

Compatibility Notes

Chainguard's argocd-agent image is a drop-in replacement for the upstream argocd-agent image. It ships the single argocd-agent binary, which runs either the principal (hub) or the agent (spoke) component depending on the subcommand, and it keeps the upstream entrypoint so the official Helm charts work unchanged. The argocd-agentctl administrative CLI used to bootstrap the PKI and register agents is published as a separate package and, as with the upstream image, is not part of this runtime image. The container runs as a non-root user (UID 999).

Getting Started

argocd-agent extends a central Argo CD installation across many managed clusters. A single principal runs next to Argo CD on the control-plane cluster and accepts mutually-authenticated gRPC connections from agents running on the managed clusters.

Confirm the image and list the available components:

docker run --rm cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/argocd-agent:latest --help

The principal and agent are published as OCI Helm charts, and both run this single image selected by their subcommand.

Before installing the principal, bootstrap the PKI with argocd-agentctl following the upstream getting started guide: initialize the certificate authority and issue the principal's server certificate (with the address agents dial as a SAN via --dns/--ip), the resource-proxy certificate, and the JWT signing key (the principal fails to start without the resource-proxy TLS secret unless you disable principal.resourceProxy). Then create a values file that overrides the image to this one and binds the gRPC listener on all interfaces so remote agents can connect (the chart default of 127.0.0.1 only accepts in-pod connections):

cat > principal-values.yaml <<EOF
image:
  repository: cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/argocd-agent
  tag: latest
principal:
  listen:
    host: ""
EOF

Install the principal on the control-plane cluster:

helm install argocd-agent-principal \
  oci://ghcr.io/argoproj-labs/argocd-agent/argocd-agent-principal \
  --namespace argocd --values principal-values.yaml

On each managed cluster, issue the agent's client certificate with argocd-agentctl and create a values file that points at the principal and overrides the image:

cat > agent-values.yaml <<EOF
image:
  repository: cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/argocd-agent
  tag: latest
server: principal.example.com
serverPort: "443"
EOF

Install the agent on the managed cluster:

helm install argocd-agent-agent \
  oci://ghcr.io/argoproj-labs/argocd-agent/argocd-agent-agent \
  --namespace argocd --values agent-values.yaml

Once connected, the agent logs Connected to <principal-version>, confirming the mutual-TLS handshake succeeded. Refer to adding agents for the full agent registration workflow.

Documentation and Resources

• argocd-agent documentation
• argocd-agent on GitHub
• Argo CD documentation

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard's free tier of Starter container images are built with Wolfi, our minimal Linux undistro.

All other Chainguard Containers are built with Chainguard OS, Chainguard's minimal Linux operating system designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a more secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Containers include:

• Minimal design, without unnecessary software bloat
• Daily builds to ensure container images are up-to-date with available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs attesting to the provenance of all artifacts within the image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

For cases where you need container images with shells and package managers to build or debug, most Chainguard Containers come paired with a development, or -dev, variant.

In all other cases, including Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest or with a specific version number, the container images include only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they include additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to copy artifacts from the -dev variant into a more minimal production image.

Need additional packages?

To improve security, Chainguard Containers include only essential dependencies. Need more packages? Chainguard customers can use Custom Assembly to add packages, either through the Console, chainctl, or API.

To use Custom Assembly in the Chainguard Console: navigate to the image you'd like to customize in your Organization's list of images, and click on the Customize image button at the top of the page.

Learn More

Refer to our Chainguard Containers documentation on Chainguard Academy. Chainguard also offers VMs and Libraries — contact us for access.

Trademarks

This software listing is packaged by Chainguard. The trademarks set forth in this offering are owned by their respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement by such companies.