Is git write back needed for digest update strategy?

[NINNiT]

Hi,

I'm wondering wheter or not the git write back method is strictly needed for digest update strategies.

Example:

GitOps Repos:
app1-manifests
argocd-applicationsets

we use kustomize in app1-manifests and set the image there like this:

images:
  - name: image
    newName: myregistry.com/apps/frontend
    newTag: beta

this is our argocd-image-updater annotation in the application set:

apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1
kind: ApplicationSet
metadata:
  name: frontend
spec:
  goTemplate: true
  goTemplateOptions: ["missingkey=error"]
  generators:
    - matrix:
        generators:
          - list:
              elements:
                - environment: staging
                  url: https://cluster..local.eu:6443
                  image: myregistry.com/apps/frontend:beta
                  image_strategy: digest
          - list:
              elements:
                - namespace: namespace

  template:
    metadata:
      name: "{{.namespace}}-{{.environment}}-app1"
      annotations:
        argocd-image-updater.argoproj.io/image-list: "image={{.image}}"
        argocd-image-updater.argoproj.io/image.update-strategy: "{{.image_strategy}}"
    spec:
      project: default
      source:
        repoURL: https://mygitlab.com/deployment/app1-manifests.git
        targetRevision: HEAD
        path: "{{.environment}}"
      destination:
        server: "{{.url}}"
        namespace: "{{.namespace}}"
      syncPolicy:
        automated:
          prune: true
          selfHeal: true
        syncOptions:
          - CreateNamespace=true

│ time="2024-09-23T16:42:22Z" level=info msg="Successfully updated image myregistry.com/apps/frontend@dummy' to 'myregistry.com/apps/frontend@sha256:4b37da38eba70826d24fbc18c281550ca0c236415c885e026e35a06f01003cbb', but pend....
│ time="2024-09-23T16:42:22Z" level=info msg="Committing 1 parameter update(s) for application app1" application=app     1                         
│ time="2024-09-23T16:42:23Z" level=info msg="Successfully updated the live application spec" application=app1
│ time="2024-09-23T16:42:23Z" level=info msg="Processing results: applications=2 images_considered=2 images_skipped=0 images_updated=2 errors=0"                                                                                                        │
...

Even though, looking at the logs, the update seems to work, my pods will not restart and will not use the new hash instead of the beta tag.
After 2 minutes, i get the same log message again.

Thanks for the help! <3

[jannfis]

The git write back method is not required by any given strategy.

However, with ApplicationSet overwriting external changes to an Application, Git write back is required in these scenarios.

You might have some luck with trying to have ApplicationSet controller ignore some modifications to the Applications.