Setup and installation of 'ARGO-CD' on GCP

This section describes how to provision and connect to ‘Effortless Deployments on Kubernetes with Argo-CD’ VM solution on GCP.

1. Open Effortless Deployments on Kubernetes with Argo CD listing on GCP Marketplace
2. Click Get Started.

It will ask you to enable the API’s if they are not enabled already for your account. Please click on enable as shown in the screenshot.

• It will take you to the agreement page. On this page, you can change the project from the project selector on top navigator bar as shown in the below screenshot.

• Accept the Terms and agreements by ticking the checkbox and clicking on the AGREE button.

• It will show you the successfully agreed popup page. Click on Deploy.

• On deployment page, give a name to your deployment.

• In Deployment Service Account section, click on Existing radio button and Choose a service account from the Select a Service Account dropdown.

• If you don't see any service account in dropdown, then change the radio button to New Account and create the new service account here.
• If after selecting New Account option, you get below permission error message then please reach out to your GCP admin to create service account by following Step by step guide to create GCP Service Account and then refresh this deployment page once the service account is created, it should be available in the dropdown.

You are missing resourcemanager.projects.setIamPolicy permission, which is needed to set the required roles on the created Service Account

• Select a zone where you want to launch the VM(such as us-east1-a)

• Optionally change the number of cores and amount of memory. ( This defaults to 4 vCPUs and 15 GB RAM)

• Optionally change the boot disk type and size. (This defaults to ‘Standard Persistent Disk’ and 30 GB respectively)

• Optionally change the network name and subnetwork names. Be sure that whichever network you specify has ports 22 (for ssh), 3389 (for RDP) and 443 (for HTTPS) exposed.

• Click Deploy when you are done.

• Effortless Deployments on Kubernetes with Argo CD will begin deploying.

3. A summary page displays when the compute engine is successfully deployed. Click on the Instance link to go to the instance page .

4. On the instance page, click on the “SSH” button, select “Open in browser window”.

5. This will open SSH window in a browser.
6. Run below command to set the password for “ubuntu” user

sudo passwd ubuntu

7. Now the password for ubuntu user is set, you can connect to the VM’s desktop environment from any local windows machine using RDP or linux machine using Remmina.

8. To connect using RDP via Windows machine, first note the external IP of the VM from VM details page as highlighted below

9. Then From your local windows machine, goto “start” menu, in the search box type and select “Remote desktop connection”

10. In the “Remote Desktop connection” wizard, paste the external ip and click connect

11. This will connect you to the VM’s desktop environment. Provide “ubuntu” as the userid and the password set in step 6 to authenticate. Click OK

12. Now you are connected to out of box Effortless Deployments on Kubernetes with Argo CD VM’s desktop environment via Windows machines.

13. To connect using RDP via Linux machine, first note the external IP of the VM from VM details page,then from your local Linux machine, goto menu, in the search box type and select “Remmina”.

    Note: If you don’t have Remmina installed on your Linux machine, first Install Remmina as per your linux distribution.

14. In the “Remmina Remote Desktop Client” wizard, select the RDP option from dropdown and paste the external ip and click enter.

15. This will connect you to the VM’s desktop environment. Provide “ubuntu” as the userid and the password set in step 6 to authenticate. Click OK

16. Now you are connected to out of box Effortless Deployments on Kubernetes with Argo CD VM’s desktop environment via Linux machine.

17. To access the ARGO-CD Web Interface, copy the Public address of the VM from VM’s overview page and enter in the browser as https://public_ip_of_vm. Make sure to use https in the URL. Browser will show you the security warning, except the warning and continue to login page.

NOTE: If you are getting time out error or UI is not coming then please wait 5-10 minutes and try again.

18. To retrieve the argocd ui password, connect via terminal and run below command.

kubectl -n argocd get secret argocd-initial-admin-secret -o jsonpath="{.data.password}" | base64 -d

19. On the login page, enter admin as username and password we retrived from the above command and sign in.

20. This is the ARGO-CD Home page.

21. Please make sure to update the admin user password after your first login. To do so go to “user info” menu in left pane and click “Update Password” button.

22. Click on Update password, provide the new password and save the changes. Logout and login with new password.

For more details please refer to ARGO-CD Official documentation