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 you promote. 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 won't immediately revert your 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 your image registries and Git repos for new artifacts, bundles each set into a versioned unit called Freight, and moves that Freight through your environments as a chain of Stages. Each Stage can verify a release against your own checks before it advances, and the rendered manifests are written back to Git so the state of every environment stays in version control.

Kargo is built by the Akuity team behind Argo CD, and comes in two editions: Kargo open source, free for everyone, and Kargo Enterprise.

Kargo was open-sourced in 2023 and has grown quickly since, with millions of downloads and thousands of GitHub stars. [Editor: confirm the exact adoption figure and cite the latest Argo CD End User Survey on promotion tooling.]

In short: if Argo CD deploys your 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 you manually promoted an older Freight, for example to roll a Stage back, auto-promotion would immediately promote the newest Freight again and revert your 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 Freight you chose. Auto-promotion resumes once you promote the current candidate 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 do 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 you promote

The promote drawer now shows a diff between a Stage's current Freight and the incoming Freight, so you can see 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 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 ProjectConfig CRD, but the controller that acts on it ships in Enterprise. Read the automated rollback announcement.

Upgrade to v1.11

Running Kargo in production? Upgrade to v1.11.0 and review the full changelog for everything that changed, including breaking changes to allowTags/ignoreTags enforcement.

Exploring Kargo? Take the Kargo Quick Start or join the community on Discord.