Pipeline CRDs is an open source implementation to configure and run CI/CD style pipelines for your kubernetes application.
Pipeline CRDs creates Custom Resources as building blocks to declare pipelines.
A custom resource is an extension of Kubernetes API which can create a custom Kubernetes Object. Once a custom resource is installed, users can create and access its objects with kubectl, just as they do for built-in resources like pods, deployments etc. These resources run on-cluster and are implemeted by Kubernetes Custom Resource Definition (CRD).
High level details of this design:
- Pipelines do not know what will trigger them, they can be triggered by events or by manually creating PipelineRuns
- Tasks can exist and be invoked completely independently of Pipelines; they are highly cohesive and loosely coupled
- Test results are a first class concept, being able to navigate test results easily is powerful (e.g. see failures easily, dig into logs, e.g. like the Jenkins test analyzer plugin)
- Tasks can depend on artifacts, output and parameters created by other tasks.
- Resources are the artifacts used as inputs and outputs of TaskRuns.
Below diagram lists the main custom resources created by Pipeline CRDs:
A Task is a collection of sequential steps you would want to run as part of your continous integration flow.
A task will run inside a container on your cluster. A Task declares:
- Inputs the task needs.
- Outputs the task will produce.
- Sequence of steps to execute. Each step is a container image.
Here is an example simple Task definition which echoes "hello world". The hello-world
task does not define any inputs or outputs.
It only has one step named echo
. The step uses the builder image busybox
whose entrypoint set to \bin\sh
.
apiVersion: pipeline.knative.dev/v1alpha1
kind: Task
metadata:
name: hello-world
namespace: default
spec:
steps:
- name: echo
image: busybox
command:
- echo
args:
- "hello world!"
Examples of Task
definitions with inputs and outputs are here
To get the logs out of a step, we provide our own executable that wraps
the command
and args
values specified in the step
. This means that every
Task
must use command
, and cannot rely on the image's entrypoint
.
To run a step needs to pull an Entrypoint
image. Maybe the image is hard to pull
in your environment, so we provide a way for you to configure that by edit the image
's
value in a configmap named config-entrypoint
.
Pipelines
describes a graph of Tasks to execute.
Below, is a simple pipeline which runs hello-world-task
twice one after the other.
In this echo-hello-twice
pipeline, there are two named tasks; hello-world-first
and hello-world-again
.
Both the tasks, refer to Task
hello-world
mentioned in taskRef
config.
apiVersion: pipeline.knative.dev/v1alpha1
kind: Pipeline
metadata:
name: echo-hello-twice
namespace: default
spec:
tasks:
- name: hello-world-first
taskRef:
name: hello-world
- name: hello-world-again
taskRef:
name: hello-world
Examples of pipelines with complex DAGs are here
PipelinesResources
in a pipeline are the set of objects that are going to be used as inputs to a Task
and can be output of Task
.
For example:
- A task's input could be a github source which contains your application code.
- A task's output can be your application container image which can be then deployed in a cluster.
Read more on PipelineResources and their types here
PipelineResources
in a pipelines are the set of objects that are going to be used
as inputs and outputs of a TaskRun
.
PipelineParams
contains parameters for a Pipeline. One Pipeline
can be invoked with many different instances of PipelineParams
, which can allow
for scenarios such as running against PRs and against a user’s personal setup.
PipelineParams
can control:
- Which serviceAccount to use (provided to all tasks)
- Where results are stored (e.g. in GCS)
For example:
apiVersion: pipeline.knative.dev/v1alpha1
kind: PipelineParams
metadata:
name: pipelineparams-sample
namespace: default
spec:
serviceAccount: 'demoServiceAccount'
results:
runs:
type: 'gcs'
url: 'gcs://somebucket/results/runs'
logs:
type: 'gcs'
url: 'gcs://somebucket/results/logs'
tests:
type: 'gcs'
url: 'gcs://somebucket/results/tests'
To invoke a Pipeline
or a Task
, you must create a corresponding
Run
:
Creating a TaskRun
will invoke a Task, running all of the steps until
completion or failure. Creating a TaskRun
will require satisfying all of the input
requirements of the Task
.
TaskRuns
can be created directly by a user or by a PipelineRun.
Creating a PipelineRun
executes the pipeline, creating TaskRuns for each
task in the pipeline.
PipelineRuns
tie together:
- A Pipeline
- A PipelineParam
- The PipelineResources to use for each Task
A PipelineRun
could be created:
- By a user manually
- In response to an event (e.g. in response to a Github event, possibly processed via Knative eventing)