In this lesson, you will learn how to deploy the Argo CD control plane into your Kubernetes cluster using standardized Helm charts to manage its core components.
While you are familiar with using Helm to orchestrate multi-service deployments, applying this pattern to your GitOps controller itself ensures that your Argo CD instance remains version-controlled, repeatable, and easily scalable across environments. By using the official Argo CD Helm chart, you treat your deployment tool as a first-class citizen of your infrastructure.
The Standardized Approach
When installing Argo CD, avoid manual manifests. Instead, leverage the Helm chart to manage the argocd-server, repo-server, and application-controller components. This allows you to manage configuration—such as custom TLS certificates, OIDC integration, and resource quotas—via a centralized values.yaml file.
To begin, add the repository and install the chart into a dedicated namespace:
# Add the Argo Helm repository
helm repo add argo https://argoproj.github.io/argo-helm
helm repo update
# Deploy Argo CD with standardized values
helm install argocd argo/argo-cd \
--namespace argocd \
--create-namespace \
-f values.yaml
Why Helm for the Control Plane?
Managing the controller via Helm provides two distinct advantages over manifest files. First, it simplifies configuration drift management. By defining your values.yaml, you ensure that every instance of Argo CD across your dev, staging, and production clusters follows the same security posture and resource constraints.
Second, it facilitates lifecycle management. Upgrading your GitOps engine becomes a trivial helm upgrade command, allowing you to track configuration changes in your own Git repository. Because you have already mastered pipeline-as-code and environment promotion, you should manage this values.yaml file within a Git repository to ensure your Argo CD deployment itself follows the GitOps principles it is designed to enforce. Once deployed, Argo CD begins its primary task: continuously monitoring your application repositories and reconciling the state of your clusters to match your Git history.
Key Takeaway: By installing Argo CD via Helm, you standardize the deployment of your GitOps engine, ensuring that your controller configuration is declarative, version-controlled, and consistent across all managed clusters.