After months of contributions, discussions, and testing from the community, Argo CD v3.2 RC is here! While it’s not the final release, this milestone gives us a sneak peek into what’s coming next for GitOps practitioners and platform teams.
This release candidate brings a collection of exciting new features along with critical bug fixes, and in this post, we’ll highlight the most important updates you should be aware of.
IMPORTANT: Please note that Argo CD v2.x will not be supported once the Argo CD v3.2 release is released
Health Checks Added for GitOps Promoter
This PR introduces comprehensive health checks for GitOps Promoter resources, enabling enhanced monitoring and reliability for promotion workflows within Argo CD.
The new health checks cover various GitOps Promoter custom resource definitions, such as CommitStatus, PullRequest, PromotionStrategy, and ChangeTransferPolicy, providing detailed runtime status to help users better diagnose and maintain promotion pipelines.
Shoutout to Michael Crenshaw (Intuit) for this feature!
New Deletion Strategy for Progressive Sync
With Argo CD v3.2 RC, Progressive Sync now supports configurable deletion strategies for applications deployed by an ApplicationSet. Until now, deletions have always happened all at once, with every application removed in parallel and without any defined order. While this behavior remains the default, a new Reverse option has been introduced. When enabled, applications are deleted in the opposite order of their deployment, as defined in progressiveSync. This ensures that each application is fully removed before proceeding to the next, making it especially useful for workloads that depend on a specific teardown sequence.
For example, let’s say you’re deploying applications in a specific order using Progressive Sync. With the new deletionOrder field, you can now control how those applications are torn down.
apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1
kind: ApplicationSet
metadata:
name: sample-appset
spec:
strategy:
type: RollingSync
rollingSync:
steps:
- matchExpressions:
- key: environment
operator: In
values: [ "dev" ]
- matchExpressions:
- key: environment
operator: In
values: [ "staging" ]
deletionOrder: Reverse
In this example, applications are deployed first to dev and then to staging. With deletionOrder: Reverse, Argo CD will delete staging before dev, ensuring a clean and safe teardown sequence that respects dependency order. Without this setting (the default AllAtOnce), both environments would be deleted in parallel, which can cause problems if one depends on the other.
Shoutout to Kanika Rana (Red Hat) for this feature!
Hydrator Improvements:
There have been a bunch of hydrator improvements in this release, out of which some have been listed below
- Add the ability to template the commit message for source hydrator (by @pbhatnagar-oss)
- Provide template support for writing credentials for hydrator (by @pbhatnagar-oss)
- Preserve non-hydrated files during hydration (by Nitish Kumar (Akuity))
- Parallelize repo server calls to generate manifests for a group of apps destined for the same target branch (by Michael Crenshaw (Intuit))
- And many more…..
It is recommended to go through the release notes to gather more information about hydrator improvements.
Adding a Title matching filter for Pull Request Generator
Argo CD v3.2 now comes with added title matching support to the Pull Request Generator in Argo CD’s ApplicationSet, providing a new way to filter and select pull requests based on the PR title, not just the branch name. This enhancement enables users to define filters using the pull request title string, improving flexibility for workflows where PR titles convey important context or naming patterns, such as release types, ticket numbers, or automated upgrade bots
Shoutout to Nitish Kumar (Akuity) for this feature!
Server-Side Diff Support in Argo CD CLI
This PR brings powerful new capabilities to the Argo CD CLI by adding support for server-side diff calculations. With the new — server-side-diff flag, users can now perform diff operations using the Kubernetes API server’s dry-run apply, resulting in more accurate and realistic comparisons that reflect the true behavior of resource application as seen by the cluster.
The enhancement integrates with both client-side and server-side manifest generation, offers robust handling of custom resource types, and ensures consistent output for advanced workflows such as previewing changes from local manifests before applying them.
Shoutout to Peter Jiang (Intuit) for this feature!
Other Notable Changes:
Here are some other new changes that made it into the release
- Implemented Altinity clickhouse-operator CRD health checks (by Szymon Kośla)
- Ability to pass authenticated user ID as headers to extensions (by Alexandre Gaudreault from Intuit)
- Get the commit server URL from the environment variable (by Alexej Disterhoft from Redcare Pharmacy N.V. — Data)
- Improved developer guide for Argo CD (by Regina Voloshin from Octopus Deploy)
- Fix the hydrator issue about repo URL normalization if two apps have different repo URL formats (by Michael Crenshaw from Intuit)
- Expose `ARGOCD_SYNC_WAVE_DELAY` env as configurable parameter (by Kai Udo)
- and many more……
Where can I get the new Release?
For more details and installation instructions, check the release notes and upgrade instructions. Please try the release candidate and share your feedback. A big thanks to all Argo Community contributors and users for their contributions, feedback, and help in testing the release!
<hr /><p>Argo CD v3.2 Release Candidate was originally published in Argo Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.</p>