Deploying and Using Weave GitOps and Flamingo to Manage Flux and Argo CD Workloads

Flux originally offered a Web UI for cluster management, but it has been archived; users can instead use the open‑source Weave GitOps project ( https://github.com/weaveworks/weave-gitops ) as a free GUI for Flux.

Weave GitOps

Weave GitOps improves developer experience by simplifying deployment and management of cloud‑native applications on Kubernetes, providing a guided UI that visualizes relationships between Flux objects and offers insights into deployments.

The project offers both an open‑source version and an enterprise edition; the OSS version includes a UI and CLI tools that run on macOS (x86 and ARM), Linux, and WSL.

Installation methods for the gitops CLI include a curl command that downloads a tarball, as well as Homebrew for macOS:

$ curl --silent --location "https://github.com/weaveworks/weave-gitops/releases/download/v0.32.0/gitops-$(uname)-$(uname -m).tar.gz" | tar xz -C /tmp
sudo mv /tmp/gitops /usr/local/bin
gitops version

brew tap weaveworks/tap
brew install weaveworks/tap/gitops

After installing the CLI, the workflow to deploy Weave GitOps involves generating HelmRelease and HelmRepository objects, creating dashboard credentials, committing the generated YAML to the Flux Git repository, and verifying the deployment with kubectl get pods -n flux-system .

Access to the UI is achieved via kubectl port-forward to expose the service locally, then opening http://localhost:9001 with the configured admin credentials.

Flamingo

Flamingo is the Flux Subsystem for Argo (FSA) that provides a plugin‑style extension to Argo CD, enabling visualization and management of Flux workloads through Argo CD.

The Loopback Reconciliation feature converts Argo CD application manifests into equivalent Flux objects (either Kustomization or HelmRelease ) and synchronizes the desired state using Flux rather than Argo CD’s native reconciliation.

Installation of Flamingo can be done by creating an OCIRepository and a corresponding Kustomization that points to the Flamingo manifests, then applying them with kubectl apply -f flamingo.yaml . The commands verify the repository and kustomization status.

After deploying Flamingo, Argo CD’s UI can be accessed via kubectl -n argocd port-forward svc/argocd-server 8003:443 and browsing to https://localhost:8003 . The UI shows two default FSA applications, each composed of a Flux Kustomization and a GitRepository .

Existing Argo CD installations can be upgraded with Flamingo images, and existing Flux applications can be converted to FSA applications using the flamingo CLI (installable from the Flamingo CLI release page). Example commands demonstrate generating an FSA app from a Flux Kustomization and applying the resulting resources.