All 29 Applications questions
More in Applications
How do you pin an Application to a specific Git revision or tag? What are ignoreDifferences and why are they needed? How does ArgoCD track which resources belong to an Application? What is a Project (AppProject) in ArgoCD? 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? What are ApplicationSets and what problem do they solve? What ApplicationSet generators exist and when do you use each?
Advertisement
Back to results for “Applications”
ArgoCD › Applications

How do you handle resources that ArgoCD should create but not manage/delete?

Intermediate

Answer

Use sync-options annotations: `Prune=false` stops deletion, and for out-of-band or one-time resources you can annotate to skip dry-run or apply behavior. For resources you want created if absent but not overwritten, options like `Replace=false` and selective ignoreDifferences help. This balances declarative ownership with pragmatic exceptions.
metadata:
  annotations:
    argocd.argoproj.io/sync-options: Prune=false
Real-world example A shared ConfigMap seeded once is annotated Prune=false so removing it from Git doesn't delete the live data.

Common follow-ups: What sync-options exist? | When would you set Replace=false?

Sync Waves & Hooks Sync & Health Applications
All 29 Applications questions