Pipelines Step-By-Step

Getting Started as an Administrator

An administrator user must perform the required procedures that connect Pipelines to the machines and services that enable a pipeline to run.

To furnish the service connections that allow the example pipeline to run, an administrator user must perform these steps:

Create a Node Pool

For any user to run a pipeline, you must provide Pipelines with machines for steps to execute on. In Pipelines, these machines are called nodes, and they are organized into node pools.

Pipelines must be configured with at least one node pool that contains at least one node. One node pool is set as the default node pool and available to all users.

You have a variety of choices in how node pools can be configured. Your nodes can be static (a VM in at a fixed IP address) or dynamic (on-demand in a cloud service).

To add a node pool and nodes, from the Administration tab, go to Pipelines | Node Pools.

Add Integrations

For Pipelines to connect to other services, such as GitHub, Artifactory, or Kubernetes, you must add integrations for those services. You must provide the integration with the URL endpoint for those services and credentials for a user account on that service, along with any other parameters.

The "Hello World" example pipeline requires only an integration for the source code VCS user account you will use to store the Pipelines DSL file. 

To add the integration, from the Administration tab go to Pipelines | Integrations, then click Add an Integration.

Here, we add a GitHub Integration – but you can add an integration for the VCS system you prefer to use, whether that's GitHub Enterprise, GitLab, Bitbucket, or Bitbucket Server.

After your integration is successfully added, it will be listed among the available integrations.

Add a Pipeline Source

For Pipelines to read and sync the Pipelines DSL from the source VCS repository, you must tell it where to find it by adding a pipeline source. This is best performed only after the Pipelines DSL file is checked into the source repo, so that Pipelines can sync the file immediately.

To add the integration, from the Administration tab go to Pipelines | Pipelines Sources, then click Add Pipeline Source. For simplicity, we will use a YAML file to add our example as a Single Branch pipeline source.

For more information, see Adding a Pipeline Source.

When adding the pipeline source, ensure to specify the full path of the source repository in the VCS where your Pipelines DSL will be (or is currently) stored.

Once the pipeline source is successfully added, Pipelines will sync the file to load the DSL file and create the declared resources and pipelines.

Getting Started as a Developer

The procedures in this section can all be performed by any user, with or without administrator permissions. They assume that an administrator has performed the required "getting started" steps listed above.

To load and run the demonstraton pipeline, follow these steps:

Create the Pipeline DSL

Note the name given to the integration for your source VCS account (e.g., GitHub). You can view the available integrations from the Application tab, by going to Pipelines | Integrations.

1. Copy the Pipelines DSL for the "Hello World" pipeline example to a pipelines.yml file. (You can combine the resources and steps portions into a single file.)
   
   
2. As needed, in the GitRepo resource declaration:
   1. change the gitProvider to your source VCS integration name
   2. change the path to the path of the repository where your Pipelines DSL will be stored
      
      
3. Commit the pipelines.yml file to the path repository in your source VCS account.

You must then add (or have an administrator user add) your source VCS repository as a pipeline source.

Run the Pipeline

To browse pipelines loaded from configured pipelines sources., in the Application tab go to Pipelines | My Pipelines. 

After your Git repo has been added as a pipeline source, you can see the "Hello World" application listed in In My Pipelines.

Click the name of the pipeline to see its Pipeline History. This view renders a real time, interactive, diagram of the pipeline and the results of its most current run.

The pipeline has been defined to trigger execution when a new commit is made to the Git repo.  You can also execute the pipeline by manually triggering the first step.

Once the pipeline has completed, a new run will be listed. 

Click the row of the run to view the run log for what just executed.