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Last updated: 22 Sep 2025

How to disable or re-enable an app in EKS

Pre-requisites

Disabling an app

In the values-<environment>.yaml file in the app-config chart, for your app you can set helmValues.appEnabled: false, and to also disable the workers you can set helmValues.workers.enabled: false

For example, if your app is collections-publisher you can alter your config as follows:

  govukApplications:
    - name: collections-publisher
      helmValues:
+       appEnabled: false
        arch: arm64
        appResources:
          limits:
            cpu: 1
            memory: 1Gi
          requests:
            cpu: 10m
            memory: 400Mi
        dbMigrationEnabled: true
        workers:
+         enabled: false

If the app has horizontal pod autoscaling configured you also need to disable each of the pod autoscaling rules you have set up. Your app will have a podAutoscaling section in the helmValues section. You need to set enabled: false for each rule. For example:

   - name: collections-publisher
     helmValues:
       ...SNIP...
       podAutoscaling:
         - name: collections-publisher
+          enabled: false
           ...SNIP...
         - name: collections-publisher-worker
+          enabled: false
           ...SNIP...

When these changes are deployed by ArgoCD, the deployment and the workers will be deleted and your app will be offline, any pod autoscaling will be disabled.

Re-enabling an app

Re-enabling the app is a simple reverse of disabling. You can either delete the enabled and appEnabled entries (which all default to true), or you can set them explicitly to true.

When these changes are deployed by ArgoCD, the deployment and the workers will be recreated and your app will be online again.