Installing Argo CD on Minikube

March 13, 2025

Minikube is a small kubernetes cluster meant to be used as a learning environment.
You can install minikube through homebrew with brew install minikube
Once installed you can start minikube with the command minikube start
This will change your kubecontext accordingly and all kubectl commands will be applied to the minikube cluster.

Installing ArgoCD

First create a name space for Argo with kubectl create namespace argocd
Next apply the manifest from the ArgoCD github. Make sure to use the non-HA version.
- kubectl apply -n argocd -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/argoproj/argo-cd/stable/manifests/install.yaml
- Change stable to a version number if you want to use a different version of ArgoCD.
- Versions can be found here.
Verify that everything has been applied by running kubectl get all -n argocd

To access the front end you need to port-forward the service
- kubectl port-forward svc/argocd-server -n argocd 8080:443
Now you should be able to visit localhost:8080 and see the argo login page.

If you see a “this page is unsafe” warning click advanced and the accept risk button.
You can now get the default password from a secret in the argo namespace
kubectl -n argocd get secret argocd-initial-admin-secret -o jsonpath="{.data.password}" | base64 -d; echo
The username is admin