Kargo v1.11: Auto-Promotion Holds, Freight Diffs, and Event-Driven Promotions

Kargo v1.11 makes promotions wake on events instead of polling, stops auto-promotion from overriding manual promotions, and adds a diff view before promoting. This post covers what's new in open source Kargo.

TL;DR

• Auto-promotion holds: a manual promotion pauses auto-promotion for that Freight's origin, so it does not immediately revert the change.

• Event-driven promotions: PR merges and label-based argocd-update steps wake promotions on an event, and polling steps ship with shorter defaults, down from five minutes.

• Skip unneeded Git clones: a single git ls-remote skips the clone when nothing changed, and blobless clones are back.

• Freight diffs and UI updates: see the diff between current and incoming Freight before promoting, plus a redesigned freight timeline, more readable pipeline graphs, and deep links from step outputs.

• More promotion options: file-write, an http step proxy and errorExpression, git-tag force, glob support in delete, multiple authorized Stages per Argo CD Application, Freight events, and Helm chart improvements.

• Kargo Enterprise 1.11 also adds automated rollback. Read the announcement.

What is Kargo?

Kargo is a continuous promotion controller for GitOps. It watches image registries and Git repos for new artifacts, bundles each set into a versioned unit called Freight, and moves that Freight through environments as a chain of Stages. Each Stage can verify a release against its own checks before it advances, and Kargo writes the rendered manifests back to Git so the state of every environment stays in version control. Argo CD deploys applications; Kargo decides what gets deployed where, and when.

What's new in v1.11

Manual promotions no longer get auto-reverted

If a Stage has auto-promotion enabled, Kargo automatically keeps it on the newest Freight. So when a manual promotion moves a Stage to an older Freight, for example to roll back, auto-promotion would immediately promote the newest Freight again and revert the change. In v1.11, a manual promotion places a hold that pauses auto-promotion for that Freight's origin, so the Stage stays on the selected Freight. Auto-promotion resumes once the current candidate is promoted again.

Event-driven reactions to PR merges and external checks

In earlier versions, some steps only advanced on a fixed polling interval, so a promotion could wait minutes after its condition was already met. In v1.11, PR merges and label-based argocd-update steps wake the promotion through an event instead of waiting for the next poll. The steps that poll external conditions (http, git-wait-for-pr, git-merge-pr) also ship with shorter default intervals, down from five minutes. This mainly affects promotions that gate on PR merges or external checks. See the webhook receiver docs.

Skip Git clones when nothing changed

For large monorepos subscribed to by many Warehouses, artifact discovery used to require a full clone on every check. Kargo now uses a single git ls-remote request to detect when nothing has changed and skips the clone entirely, and blobless clones are back with an automatic fallback for servers that do not support them. At steady state, most checks cost one lightweight request instead of a full clone.

See a diff before promoting

The promote drawer now shows a diff between a Stage's current Freight and the incoming Freight, surfacing what changes before promoting. This helps when developers or approvers promote by hand. The freight timeline is redesigned, pipeline graphs are easier to read with a search box for large pipelines, and promotion steps can emit deep links to the PRs, tickets, or dashboards a promotion touches.

And more

New promotion options (a file-write step, http step proxy and errorExpression, git-tag force, glob support in delete), multiple authorized Stages per Argo CD Application, Freight events and a discoveredAt timestamp, and a batch of Helm chart improvements. See the full Kargo v1.11 release notes for the complete list.

Automated rollback in Kargo Enterprise

Kargo Enterprise 1.11 also adds automated rollback: when a stage fails verification, Kargo restores the last verified Freight automatically, through the same promotion path. The autoRollback field is visible in the open source ProjectConfigCRD, but the controller that acts on it ships in Enterprise. Read the automated rollback announcement.

Upgrade to Kargo v1.11

Teams running Kargo in production should upgrade to v1.11.0 and review the full changelog for everything that changed, including breaking changes to allowTags/ignoreTags enforcement.

Teams exploring Kargo can take the Kargo Quick Start or join the community on Discord.