helm template - Helmfile, which way to go?

I am involved several projects CI/CD structures for deployment to Kubernetes with GitOps principles.

Some of the projects started before I joined them, I could not have to much influence on those and some others I was involved at the startup but I was not really happy with the end results so I was in a search of how would an ideal delivery pipeline for Kubernetes should look like.

After reading several peoples proposals and designs, I arrived a solution like the following.

I try to use Best Practices that there are consensus from several sources and the principles of 12 Factor App.

It starts with a Git Repository per Service principle and having a Service Pipeline that is producing an Executable, a Docker Image and pushing to a Docker Registry and Helm Chart with Docker Image id and with the configuration that is valid for all environments and push it to a Helm Repository.

So with every commit to the Service Git Repositories, Service Pipelines will trigger to produces new Docker Images and Helm Charts (There is only one convention, Helm Chart Version will be only increased if there is an actual change to the structure of the Helm Templates, placing only the actual Docker Image Id into the Helm Chart will not bump the Version of the Helm Charts).

A commit to the Service Git Repository would also trigger the Environment Pipeline for the Dev Environment (this is oversimplified to be able to keep the size of the diagram in check, for Feature and Bugfix branches Environment Pipeline can also create additional Namespaces under Dev k8s cluster).

At this point, is one big change from my previous production implementation of similar pipelines and the reason of this question. In those implementations, at this point Environment Pipeline would get all Service Helm Charts from Helm Repository with the help of the Helm Umbrella Chart (unlike the diagram below) and execute 'helm upgrade --install appXXX -n dev -f values-s1.yaml -f values-s2.yaml -f values-s3.yaml -f values-s4.yaml -f values-s5.yaml' which works but the disadvantage being the auditing.

We can identify by inspecting K8s Cluster what we deployed a later point in the time but it would be painful, so my idea is to follow GitOps principles (and many sources agrees with me) and render the manifests from Helm Umbrella Chart with 'helm template' during the 'Environment Pipeline' and commit those to Environment Repository, so that way, first those can be much more easily audited and secondly I can deploy those with the help of the Continuous Deployment tool like ArgoCD.

Now that I explained the precondition, we are arrived to my actual question, I also read from the same sources I mentioned, 'helmfile' is also an awesome tool when I read the documentation, it has really nice tool to prevent boilerplate code but considering, I am planning to synchronise the the state in the Environment Git Repository with ArgoCD, I will not use 'helmfile sync' and 'helm template' does basically what 'helmfile template' does, is using 'helmfile' also in this workflow is an overkill? Additionally I think the concept of Helmfile's 'environment.yaml' collides what I try to achieve with Environment Git Repository.

And secondly, if I decide also to use 'helmfile', mainly because of the awesome extra templating functions preventing the boilerplate, how should I integrate it with ArgoCD, it seems previously it could be integrated over...

data:
  configManagementPlugins: |
  - name: helmfile
    generate:
      command: ["/bin/sh", "-c"]
      args: ["helmfile -q template --include-crds --skip-tests"]

but it seems now 'configManagementPlugins' is deprecated, how should I integrate it with ArgoCD?

Thx for answers.

Solution

Answer from @Vanderworld is really useful but I followed another pattern, which you can read the concept on this blog and a complete implementation with Azure DevOps Pipelines in this blog.

Basically I decided to render k8s manifest with helmfile template and commit the manifests to GiT and let ArgoCD read from there.