Unable to set annotations or labels on core components

[martijnhybrit]

It is pretty common practice in helm charts to have configurations to specify additional annotations and labels on components to provide a way to interact with other components running on the cluster. Currently it is only possible to set annotations on pods but not on deployment/stateful sets. Sombody has already create a MR that partially fixes this: #2100.

[MinerYang]

Hi @martijnhybrit ,

Would you like to try using helm-hook to achieve this goal as a solution?

[martijnhybrit]

Hi @MinerYang, Unfortunately that is not an option as we are using argocd for our chart rollouts so the regular helm lifecylce is not applicable.

[BlueIce]

For us it would be especially useful to be able to set annotations on harbor-core deployment. With that we could use Reloader to enable automatic restart on database password change.

[parisnakitakejser]

Hi @MinerYang, Unfortunately that is not an option as we are using argocd for our chart rollouts so the regular helm lifecylce is not applicable.

When using ArgoCD, you don’t get full support for native Helm features.
I recommend combining FluxCD with ArgoCD and letting Flux handle the Helm chart deployments.

The issue with ArgoCD is that it only performs a “helm template” operation rather than a full “helm install” process. That’s just how ArgoCD is designed — it renders the manifests instead of executing Helm’s lifecycle hooks.

To address this, you could either adjust your setup to use real Helm chart installations through FluxCD,
or consider having Harbor implement “ArgoCD hooks” within the chart.
For example, by marking a chart with an annotation like gitops.tool: argo, ArgoCD could interpret and replace Helm hooks with its own mechanism.

I personally don’t prefer that approach, but it might be a workaround until the ArgoCD team decides to better support Helm’s native behavior. 😊