Access to the manifests for the current state and the new state?

[jwilkicki]

One of the reasons that I was excited about this tool is that you've figured out a pretty elegant way of getting Argo CD to safely dump out the rendered manifests with different parameters so that you can diff them. It looks like the intended use case is purely manual inspection. However, I would like to get access to the rendered manifests so I could do other kinds of analysis on them. Something along the lines of helm unit tests where I could check parts of the YAML manifests for semantic correctness or to make sure that certain parameters are present that are required in my environment.

Would it be possible to get access in some way to the rendered manifests and not just the diff? It might even be interesting to split the rendering part into a different library or tool and have this tool make use of it.

Thank you for this excellent work and I'm excited to see where you take it next.

[dag-andersen]

Hi @jwilkicki
All the rendered manifests from both branches should already be available to you in the current build.
Instead of checking the result with cat ./output/diff.md, you can look at the files in ./output/base and ./output/target. Each file in those folders represents an app in your repo. Keep in mind that if you have multiple Argo CD Applications with the same name, they will be suffixed with -1, -2, -3, and so on.

The reason this isn’t documented is mostly because I change the implementation quite often, and I didn’t want to worry about backwards compatibility or accidentally breaking people’s workflows if they rely on the naming of those files.

Let me know if this is what you are looking for :) Otherwise, it might be possible to create a dedicated feature for this use case.

[jwilkicki]

It is. Ultimately, I'd like to use the rendered manifests with something like the Helm BDD unit test tools to make sure that we have set our values properly so that the chart renders the expected manifests. To that end, it would be helpful to be able to render the manifests of just one branch to perform checks against, in addition to seeing what the changes are between different branches.

[dwilliams782]

To add on to this - I'll likely take the output of ./output/target and pass them to conftest / kubeconform, it would be very useful!

[dag-andersen]

@jwilkicki @dwilliams782

I just merged a PR that updates the output folder to include:

./output/diff.md
./output/base-branch.yaml
./output/target-branch.yaml

So the so-called current state is in base-branch.yaml, and the new state is in target-branch.yaml

I'll probably make a release next week - I'm pretty busy this week :)