Add support for arbitrary links in app dashboard

[carsonoid]

Summary

Add the ability to enrich the dashboard with extra links. Links to things like monitoring pages or documentation instead of just ingress hosts or other apps.

Motivation

I love the way that I can jump between apps or directly to an ingress host from the app dashboard. In fact, I love it so much that I wish I could put more, arbitrary links to things in that dashboard so that it can be a single view for all the relevant details for an app.

Proposal

Argo-CD could support a per-resource annotation that would cause the app dashboard to generate clickable links to outside pages on that resource.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: my-svc
  annotations:
    argocd.argoproj.io/external-link: http://my-grafana.com/pre-generated-link

Then, whenever any resource as that annotation, it generates an additional link button to the given url on that resource.

There could also be a sort of "Phase 2" implementation of this concept with a new CRD. Maybe somthing like:

apiVersion: argoproj.io/v1alpha1
kind: ArgoCDInterfaceTile
metadata:
  name: my-svc-dashboard
spec:
  link:
    text: Grafana Dashboard
    url: http://my-grafana.com/pre-generated-link
    color: light-red
    text-color: black
    # image would be optional
    image:
      source:
        # emojiName is mutually exclusive with url. You should be able to give it a text
        # name for an emoji and the dashboard will attempt to render it, but render nothing if it doesn't
        # match a known emoji name
        emojiName: heavy_exclamation_mark

        # url is mutually exclusive with emojiName. It is the full url
        # to the the image source and will be hot-linked
        # url: http://my-image-source.com/images/dashboard.png

Putting that into an app would cause an extra tile to show up with the given information. This might be overkill, but I really think that Argo-CD's interface is one of it's best features so it would be awesome to be able to do just a bit more with it.

Since the resource is defined as a CRD, end-users would still have all the normal mechanisms for resource generation (helm, kustomize, etc).

[nahum-litvin-hs]

I cannot find if something like this already exists
do we have something link proposed kind: ArgoCDInterfaceTile?
or any other way to create a contextual menu for tiles?

[carsonoid]

You can add links to tiles by adding annotations to resources. That is merged into main.

The interface tile proposal has not had any approval or progress yet. Although I would love to see it get pulled in. I still feel like the left half of the app page is a lot of empty space that we should make usable by users.

[tyrken]

The current feature is as merged in #4380 is ok, but it's annoying that the early returns such as

argo-cd/controller/cache/info.go

Lines 41 to 46 in a51169e

	case "extensions", "networking.k8s.io":
	switch gvk.Kind {
	case kube.IngressKind:
	populateIngressInfo(un, res)
	return
	}

skip lines 55-62 which read the annotation into ExternalURLs.

My use case is adding a link to an AWS ALB ingress - TBH I'd rather override the existing one lifted from the status/loadBalancer/ingress/hostname as that won't match the TLS cert I'm attaching, but just getting the correct DNS as one of the options would be useful. Not sure if any other of the early returns are blocking other use cases.

[carsonoid]

I have no problem with adding annotation based links to all resources. I think the original proposal was just trying to make a minimal change. But I would be happy to create a PR to include links from annotations for all resources, even those with native link support. It should be a very simple and minimal change.

---

Coming up with a way to skip one or all links that would normally be generated for a resource type is a different issue. We would have to have some other special annotation or markup to tell the controller to skip one or all normal links.

The Argo-CD team may be more reticent to allow that change. They are trying to keep the number of "knobs" to a minimum and another special annotations for ingress might be more than they want to allow in the project.

[tyrken]

Thanks & agree overriding the normal ingress link can wait - I've created #7923 to allow all resources to add links, if you could please approve it so it can build & run tests.

[alexef]

Can we close this as it was implemented in #8231 #7923 #3487 ?

So are we still keeping it open for Part 2?

[carsonoid]

I would love to see part 2 become a thing. But I could move that to it's own issue so we can track it separately.

[carsonoid]

#11128 is a new issue summarizing phase 2.