Concourse Pipelines

GitLab Flow branching / SemVer versioning / Kubernetes release pipeline

Read the official introduction to the GitLab Flow workflow: https://about.gitlab.com/2014/09/29/gitlab-flow/

Features

• Application deployed onto a Kubernetes cluster as a Helm release
• Two branches: master (released to a staging environment) and production (released to a production environment)
• Automated semantic versioning and tagging
• Ability to include unit and integration tests
• Ability to manually bump application version: patch, minor, major

Example applications

• forms-app
• rails-react-boilerplate

Pipeline parameters / credentials

Example parameters can be found in params/gitlab-flow-semver.example.yml

You can also use Kubernetes Secrets as the credential manager for the pipeline: params/kubernetes.example

Read more about how Concourse sources values from Kubernetes Secrets: https://github.com/kubernetes/charts/tree/master/stable/concourse#kubernetes-secrets

Initialize GitLab Flow in an application repo

Add the gitlab-flow-init script to your $PATH and run the script in every new application repository to initialize the branching model.

• The master branch version is stored in the version file on the rc-version branch of the application repo, and always has the x.y.z-rc.n form
• The production branch version is stored on the final-version branch and has the x.y.z form

Add pipelines to your Concourse server

Pipeline that manages all other pipelines

The easiest way to create all of your pipelines is to have a pipeline that will set and update all other pipelines:

fly --target ci \
        set-pipeline \
        --config pipelines/concourse-pipelines.yml \
        --pipeline apps-pipelines

The pipeline will read the Kubernetes Secret that we would create beforehand (example) and create all the pipelines listed in the pipeline manifest file for us.

Manually update pipelines

fly --target ci \
        set-pipeline \
        --config pipelines/gitlab-flow-semver.yml \
        --pipeline forms-app

fly --target ci \
        destroy-pipeline \
        --pipeline forms-app