Source Controllers

Source controller

The main role of source-controller is to provide a common interface for artifacts acquisition. The source API defines a set of Kubernetes objects that cluster admins and various automated operators can interact with to offload the Git and Helm repositories operations to a dedicated controller.

Features:

• Validate source definitions
• Authenticate to sources (SSH, user/password, API token)
• Validate source authenticity (PGP)
• Detect source changes based on update policies (semver)
• Fetch resources on-demand and on-a-schedule
• Package the fetched resources into a well-known format (tar.gz, yaml)
• Make the artifacts addressable by their source identifier (sha, version, ts)
• Make the artifacts available in-cluster to interested 3rd parties
• Notify interested 3rd parties of source changes and availability (status conditions, events, hooks)

Links:

• Source code fluxcd/source-controller
• Specification docs

Source watcher

The source-watcher is a GitOps toolkit controller that extends Flux with advanced source composition and decomposition patterns.

The source-watcher controller implements the ArtifactGenerator API, which allows Flux users to:

• Compose multiple Flux sources (GitRepository, OCIRepository, Bucket) into a single deployable artifact
• Decompose monorepos into multiple independent artifacts with separate deployment lifecycles
• Optimize reconciliation by only triggering updates when specific paths change
• Structure complex deployments from distributed sources maintained by different teams

Links:

• Source code fluxcd/source-watcher
• Specification docs