GitOps Cheat Sheet

Principles and tooling for using Git as the single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and application deployments.

2 PagesAdvancedFeb 8, 2026

Core Principles

What defines a GitOps workflow.

Declarative desired state- The entire system state is described declaratively (YAML/manifests), not as imperative steps
Git as source of truth- A Git repository is the single, versioned, auditable record of the desired state
Automated reconciliation- An agent (operator) continuously compares live state to Git and converges toward it
Pull-based deployment- The cluster pulls changes from Git rather than CI pushing credentials into the cluster
Observability & drift detection- The operator surfaces when live state diverges from Git ('drift') and can auto-correct it
Everything via pull request- Changes are proposed, reviewed, and merged as PRs, giving a full audit trail

Argo CD Application

Declare an app that Argo CD syncs from Git.

yaml

apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1kind: Applicationmetadata:  name: myapp  namespace: argocdspec:  project: default  source:    repoURL: https://github.com/org/myapp-manifests.git    targetRevision: main    path: overlays/production  destination:    server: https://kubernetes.default.svc    namespace: myapp  syncPolicy:    automated:      prune: true      selfHeal: true

Flux Kustomization

Declare a Flux source and reconciliation target.

yaml

apiVersion: source.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v1kind: GitRepositorymetadata:  name: myappspec:  interval: 1m  url: https://github.com/org/myapp-manifests  ref:    branch: main---apiVersion: kustomize.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v1kind: Kustomizationmetadata:  name: myappspec:  interval: 5m  path: ./overlays/production  sourceRef:    kind: GitRepository    name: myapp  prune: true

Common Tooling

The GitOps ecosystem.

Argo CD- Kubernetes-native GitOps operator with a UI, sync waves, and app-of-apps pattern
Flux- Lightweight GitOps operator built around Kustomize/Helm controllers
Kustomize- Overlay-based YAML customization without templating, often used per-environment
Helm- Templated Kubernetes packaging, frequently combined with GitOps operators
selfHeal- Argo CD setting that automatically reverts manual cluster changes back to match Git

Pro Tip

Enable selfHeal/drift-correction only after your team trusts the pipeline — during early adoption, run in detect-only mode first so unexpected auto-reverts of manual hotfixes don't cause confusing incidents.

Was this cheat sheet helpful?

Canary Deployment Cheat Sheet

Infrastructure Monitoring Best Practices Cheat Sheet