Renovate

Renovate is a tool that continuously scans your Git repository and identifies components that should be updated. When a potential update is found, it creates a pull request, making it easy to review and implement the update.

While commonly used for development dependencies like npm, NuGet and pip, we find it increasingly useful in GitOps repositories to monitor container images and Helm charts that need updating. Renovate supports reading Kubernetes manifestes and is a very good addition to the GitOps workflow.

We see Renovate as an alternative to traditional image update mechanisms like image updater and image update policies in ArgoCD and Flux. Rather than having ArgoCD/Flux handle both image updates and Kubernetes reconciliation, it makes more sense to use Renovate as a dedicated tool for image updates. This creates a cleaner separation of concerns, where Renovate manages the GitOps repository updates while ArgoCD/Flux handles the Kubernetes deployments.

As an added benefit, you get an audit trail and potential peer review of updates since pull requests are the mechanism used. If you don't want to do the reviews, you can also configure Renovate to approve its own pull requests!