Every time someone starts self-hosting - a homelab, a few internal services for a small team - they tend to fall down the same rabbit hole: should I run K8s? And if I run K8s, do I need ArgoCD or Flux for GitOps? Two weeks later they've read a pile of Helm charts and CRDs and still haven't deployed a single service.
Let me say the quiet part out loud: for a single host, or three-to-five machines, you do not need ArgoCD. The part of GitOps you actually want - "the git repo is the source of truth, changes deploy themselves, I can roll back, and there's a record" - you can get 90% of it with git + docker compose and about twenty lines of script, with no control plane to babysit.
What "good-enough GitOps" actually is
GitOps boils down to two things:
Declarative: the desired state lives in git (for self-hosting, that's your docker-compose.yml).
