Skip to main content
Argo Rollouts is a Kubernetes controller and a set of CRDs that enable advanced deployment strategies such as canary releases, blue-green deployments, and progressive delivery. It extends native Kubernetes Deployment semantics with fine-grained rollout control, traffic shifting, metrics-driven analysis, and automated rollbacks. This guide walks through installing Argo Rollouts into a cluster, installing the kubectl plugin that provides the local dashboard proxy, and verifying the controller and UI are running.

​
What you’ll install

  • Argo Rollouts controller and CRDs
  • RBAC and ConfigMap for the controller
  • A ClusterIP metrics Service (exposes metrics internally)
  • kubectl-argo-rollouts plugin to access the UI locally
Useful links and references:

​
Install Argo Rollouts

Apply the official install manifest. This creates the argo-rollouts namespace, CRDs, RBAC, the controller Deployment, Service, ConfigMap, and related resources. Run:
The install manifest creates several resource types. Example of common resources created: Example output you may see after applying the manifest:
Confirm the controller pod and service are running in the argo-rollouts namespace:
Example output:
The Rollouts controller exposes metrics via a ClusterIP Service (internal to the cluster). It does not provide an externally hosted dashboard by default — to view the Rollouts UI locally, install the kubectl plugin which proxies the dashboard to your machine.

​
Install the kubectl-argo-rollouts plugin

The Rollouts UI is accessed through the kubectl plugin binary kubectl-argo-rollouts, which registers as kubectl argo rollouts. Download the appropriate binary for your OS/architecture from the Argo Rollouts GitHub releases page.
A dark-themed GitHub release page showing the "Assets" list for an argo-rollouts release, with file names like install.yaml, dashboard-install.yaml, kubectl-argo-rollouts binaries for multiple OS/architectures, checksums and YAML/JSON assets. Each entry shows a sha256 hash, file size and the Jun 5 date in a scrollable table.
Download, make executable, and move the binary into your PATH. Adjust the URL and filename to match the release and platform you chose:
Verify the plugin is installed and check its version:
Example output:
After installing the binary as /usr/local/bin/kubectl-argo-rollouts the plugin is available as the kubectl subcommand kubectl argo rollouts.

​
Launch the Rollouts dashboard

Start the local dashboard proxy to serve the UI on http://localhost:3100/rollouts by default:
  • The command opens a local proxy and hosts the UI at http://localhost:3100/rollouts.
  • If you don’t pass -n, the plugin will target the default namespace or the context’s current namespace; use -n <namespace> to specify another one.
  • If you prefer a different local port, check plugin help for available flags.
Open http://localhost:3100/rollouts in your browser. If you haven’t created any Rollout resources, the UI will indicate no Rollouts in the selected namespace.

​
Next steps

  • Create a Rollout manifest (canary or blue-green) and apply it to experiment with traffic shifting and automated analysis.
  • Integrate metrics providers (Prometheus) and AnalysisTemplates for automated, metric-driven promotion or rollback.
  • See the Argo Rollouts docs for examples and advanced configuration: https://argoproj.github.io/argo-rollouts/

Watch Video