Helm diff upgrade on non-Helm resources

[gw0]

I have a couple of Helm charts deployed as a rendered manifest via ArgoCD (i.e. without app.kubernetes.io/managed-by=Helm). I thought I could use the helm-diff plugin to check for differences between a local version of the chart and the live resources.

Unfortunately, it fails due to a sanity check that does not make sense during a diff action:

$ helm diff upgrade foo . --allow-unreleased --reset-values
reading three way merge from env
********************

	Release was not present in Helm.  Diff will show entire contents as new.

********************
Error: Failed to render chart: exit status 1: Error: rendered manifests contain a resource that already exists. Unable to continue with install: ConfigMap "foo" in namespace "default" exists and cannot be imported into the current release: invalid ownership metadata; label validation error: missing key "app.kubernetes.io/managed-by": must be set to "Helm"; annotation validation error: missing key "meta.helm.sh/release-name": must be set to "foo"; annotation validation error: missing key "meta.helm.sh/release-namespace": must be set to "default"

Error: plugin "diff" exited with error

There is no --force option to turn off all sanity checks and just fetch all the resources and run a diff on them. Setting HELM_DIFF_THREE_WAY_MERGE=false also does not help.

A workaround is to add these annotations to the live resources before each helm diff (but they get immediately reverted if ArgoCD self-healing is turned on):

$ kubectl annotate $KIND $NAME meta.helm.sh/release-name=$RELEASE
$ kubectl annotate $KIND $NAME meta.helm.sh/release-namespace=$NAMESPACE
$ kubectl label $KIND $NAME app.kubernetes.io/managed-by=Helm 

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[gw0]

Still unresolved.

[xiaomudk]

I also encountered this problem, my case is Argo CD + helmfile. I expect to use helmfile diff to see the changes directly when writing a chart locally, but the helm chart deployed by Argo CD has no annotations, so I can't use helmfile diff

[xiaomudk]

@databus23 @mumoshu Can you help me?