/fhs02-continuous-delivery-droneio

Primary LanguageRuby

Continuous Delivery - drone.io

Set-up

See installation guide.

  1. Obtain an oauth2 client and secret from Github and expose as environment variable. DRONE_SECRET can be a random string
  2. docker-compose up to start drone
  3. You can now access drone on http://localhost:8080 or on whatever port you've defined in the docker-compose.yml
  4. Install CLI, don't forget to set the environment variables DRONE_SREVER and DRONE_TOKEN (can be retrieved via web interface). Execute drone info to see if everything is set up correctly.

General Notes

  • One cannot trigger builds manually, only via webhooks. If you do not want to deploy drone.io to a public server, you can use ngrok. But this is quite tedious, so we deploy drone to AWS. We used Ubuntu Xenial and the latest stable version of Docker.
  • Add new orphan branch for brakeman output, so that the brakeman output does not trigger a new build.
  • The .drone.yml can be updated just via pushing it to the repo.
  • Secrets can be stored in the secret store. Attention: Secrets are broken in v0.6. However, they work in v0.5. However, in v0.5 there is no web interface for them, so the CLI has to be used. Don't forget to sign them!
  • drone.io by itself does not offer any caching mechanism. Instead, one would have to use community-provided plugins, such as s3 or rsync.

Comparison to Concourse

Advantages:

  • Generally, the configuration file .drone.yml is easier to setup and more concise than Concourse's pipeline.yml. For example, you don't have to declare resources explicitely.

Disadvantages:

  • While Concourse's community is rather small in comparison to Jenkins, drone.io's community is even smaller. There are only a handful of Stackoverflow questions and Github issues, most of them already outdated.
  • The documentation is rather poor. Many steps are only explained in a few sentences in the Getting Started document. As of 2017-04-26, there are no tutorials and many documentation pages that are empty.
  • There are bugs, which are especially painful because of the small community. For example, as mentioned above, secrets don't work in version 0.6, only in 0.5.
  • The only way to trigger builds is via web-hooks. It would be nice if one could force a build manually, especially when running drone.io locally.
  • While drone.io's web interface looks nice and makes good use of the space, it's missing Concourse's overview which job is currently running, which job failed etc. However, they (or rather the developer) are working on it.