Last modified March 31, 2025

Update an existing App

This document is part of the documentation to use GitOps with Giant Swarm app platform. You can find more information about the app platform in our docs.

Update an existing App

In order to update an existing app, you need to edit the App resource and/or the ConfigMap or Secret resources that are associated with it. In the following sections, you will find instructions on how to do that.

Export environment variables

The management cluster, the organization, the workload cluster and the app names are needed during the process. The easiest way of providing them is by exporting them as environment variables:

export MC_NAME=CODENAME
export ORG_NAME=ORGANIZATION
export WC_NAME=CLUSTER_NAME
export APP_NAME=APP_NAME

Updating the App

There are three resources that you might need to update:

• The App resource itself.
• The ConfigMap resource that holds the user values.
• The Secret resource that holds the user values.

Updating App resource

When you want to update the version of the app, the catalog, or any other field of the App resource, you need to edit the appcr.yaml file.

Edit the appcr.yaml following always the App resource schema and apply the changes to the Git repository.

Updating configuration

In case you just want to update the configuration of the app, you need to edit the configmap.yaml with the new values. As soon as you apply the changes to the Git repository, the Flux operator will apply the changes to the workload cluster.

Updating secrets

In this case, you need to decrypt the secret.enc.yaml file before editing it. Then you perform the changes and encrypt the file again.

Import the workload cluster private GPG key from your keychain tool. In our example, you see 1Password for this purpose:

eval $(op signin)
gpg --import \
<(op read "Dev Common/GPG private key (${MC_NAME}, ${WC_NAME}, Flux)/notesPlain")

Then you can decrypt the secret.enc.yaml file and decode the values field:

sops --decrypt --in-place secret.enc.yaml
yq eval .data.values secret.enc.yaml | base64 -d > values.tmp.yaml

Now you can edit the values.tmp.yaml file with the new values. After that, you need to encode the file back to base64 and replace the values field in the secret.enc.yaml file:

export NEW_USER_VALUES=$(cat values.tmp.yaml | base64)
yq -i eval ".data.values = \"${NEW_USER_VALUES}\"" secret.enc.yaml

Finally, you can re-encrypt the secret.enc.yaml file:

sops --encrypt --in-place secret.enc.yaml

It’s a good practice to remove the decrypted file as follows:

gpg --delete-secret-keys "${KEY_FP}"

Now applying the changes to the Git repository will trigger the Flux operator to apply the changes to the workload cluster.