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What does the prune option do in a sync policy? What is selfHeal and when should you use it? How do you pin an Application to a specific Git revision or tag? What are ignoreDifferences and why are they needed? What is a Project (AppProject) in ArgoCD? How do you handle resources that ArgoCD should create but not manage/delete? How do you set an Application to auto-create its target namespace? How do Application parameters differ between Helm and Kustomize sources? How do you temporarily pause management of an Application? How do you view an Application's sync history and roll back to a prior revision?
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How does ArgoCD track which resources belong to an Application?

Intermediate

Answer

ArgoCD labels/annotates managed resources with a tracking id (by default the label app.kubernetes.io/instance, or an annotation for the newer tracking method). This lets it know which live resources an Application owns, compute diffs, and prune orphans. The tracking method is configurable to avoid clashes with other tools using the same label.
# argocd-cm
data:
  application.resourceTrackingMethod: annotation
Real-world example Switching to annotation-based tracking prevents conflicts with Helm/Kustomize that also set the instance label.

Common follow-ups: Why switch from label to annotation tracking? | How does tracking enable pruning?

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