Getting started with Pipelines Enterprise

caution

This feature is in alpha and certain aspects will change

We're very excited for people to use this feature. However, please note that changes in the API, behaviour and security will evolve. The feature is suitable to use in controlled testing environments.

Prerequisites

Before using Pipelines, please ensure that:

• You have Weave GitOps Enterprise installed on a cluster.
• You have configured Weave GitOps Enterprise RBAC for Pipelines.
• The Pipelines feature flag enablePipelines has been enabled. This flag is part of the Weave GitOps Enterprise Helm chart values and is enabled by default.
• Any leaf clusters that are running workloads that you need to visualise using Pipelines, have been added to Weave GitOps Enterprise.
• You have exposed the promotion webhook on the management cluster and leaf clusters can reach that webhook endpoint over the network.

Define a pipeline

A pipeline allows you to define the route your application is taking in order to make it to production. There are three main concepts playing in a pipeline:

• the application to deliver
• the environments that your app will go through in its way to production (general)
• the deployment targets or the clusters that each environment has

You can define a delivery pipeline using a Pipeline custom resource. An example of how it looks for an application podinfo is shown below.

Expand to view

---
apiVersion: pipelines.weave.works/v1alpha1
kind: Pipeline
metadata:
  name: podinfo-02
  namespace: flux-system
spec:
  appRef:
    apiVersion: helm.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v2beta1
    kind: HelmRelease
    name: podinfo
  environments:
    - name: dev
      targets:
        - namespace: podinfo-02-dev
          clusterRef:
            kind: GitopsCluster
            name: dev
            namespace: flux-system
    - name: test
      targets:
        - namespace: podinfo-02-qa
          clusterRef:
            kind: GitopsCluster
            name: dev
            namespace: flux-system
        - namespace: podinfo-02-perf
          clusterRef:
            kind: GitopsCluster
            name: dev
            namespace: flux-system
    - name: prod
      targets:
        - namespace: podinfo-02-prod
          clusterRef:
            kind: GitopsCluster
            name: prod
            namespace: flux-system

In the example above, the podinfo application is delivered to a traditional pipeline composed of dev, test and prod environments. An environment is used to describe the different stages of a pipeline and is composed of one or more deployment targets. A deployment target is a combination of a namespace and a GitopsCluster reference and is used to specify where the application is running in our fleet. In this case, the test environment is composed of two deployment targets, qa and perf, to indicate that although both targets are part of the same stage (testing), they can evolve separately and may run different versions of the application. Note, that there are two clusters being used for the environments, dev and prod, both of which are defined in the flux-system namespace.

For more details about the spec of a pipeline see here.

View the list of pipelines

Once flux has reconciled your pipeline you can navigate to the pipelines view to see it.

Pipeline list view show the list of pipelines you have access to. For each pipeline, a simplified view of the pipeline is shown with the application Type and Environments it goes through.

View the details of a pipeline

Once you have selected a pipeline from the list, you will navigate to its details view. In pipeline details view you could view the current status of your application by environment and deployment target.