Is there a way to bootstrap Flux to read from a protected branch?

[toby-griffiths]

The main branch of our infrastructure (Gitlab) repo is protected, and nobody is allowed to push to it.

I tried bootstrapping Flux using the main branch, because we only want approved changes to be deployed to our cluster, however this failed because Flux attempts to push the bootstrap changes back to the repo, which it can't do.

For now I've manually edited the flux-system gitrepository manifest to change the branch to main, and also changed it in the cluster's flux-system/gotk_sync.yaml file, which seems to work, however there's a warning to "DO NOT EDIT." at the top of this file. This appears to have done what I want, but is this the correct way, or is there a better way?

Chat GTP has suggested with having a branch having a protected fork repo that Flux can read & write from, and have automations to copy changes back & forth between the main repo, but I'm trying to keep things as simple as possible at this early stage of our Flux journey.

[stefanprodan]

You can use Flux Operator as it doesn’t need push access to the repo: https://github.com/controlplaneio-fluxcd/flux-operator?tab=readme-ov-file#quickstart-guide

[toby-griffiths]

Ah. Brilliant. Thank you @stefanprodan