Context
ArgoCD's Manifest Hydrator (introduced as an experimental feature in ArgoCD 2.13+) allows pre-rendering Helm/Kustomize manifests into plain YAML and committing them back to Git, enabling fully GitOps-auditable manifests and faster sync (no server-side rendering).
Goal
Evaluate and implement the ArgoCD Hydrator in the genmachine cluster to:
- Pre-render all ApplicationSet-managed Helm charts into hydrated manifests stored in Git
- Make the rendered YAML auditable and diffable in PRs (Renovate diff comments become exact k8s manifests, not values changes)
- Reduce ArgoCD control-plane load (no Helm rendering at sync time)
- Enable
argocd app diff without needing cluster access
Tasks
References
Context
ArgoCD's Manifest Hydrator (introduced as an experimental feature in ArgoCD 2.13+) allows pre-rendering Helm/Kustomize manifests into plain YAML and committing them back to Git, enabling fully GitOps-auditable manifests and faster sync (no server-side rendering).
Goal
Evaluate and implement the ArgoCD Hydrator in the
genmachinecluster to:argocd app diffwithout needing cluster accessTasks
gitops/bootstrap/genmachine/)HydrationControlleror equivalent manifest hydration pipelinehydrated/or a dedicated branch)docs/References