Getting started with Continuous Delivery

Prerequisites

Before you can create a continuous delivery toolchain from a template, you must create an instance of Continuous Delivery by selecting it from the IBM Cloud catalog. The toolchain integrates tools for planning, developing, deploying pipelines, and managing your applications. You can always add or remove tools from your toolchains. If you already have toolchains, you can view existing toolchains. For more information about working with toolchains, see Using toolchains.

Step 1: Select a toolchain template

To quickly find the toolchain template that addresses your specific requirements, select the appropriate checkboxes to filter by deployment target, tools, and practices.

1. On the Create a Toolchain page, click a toolchain template.

2. Review the description of the toolchain that you are about to create. Depending on the type of template that you select, you can review this information on the Welcome page or from the About tab. Some templates provide a diagram that shows how each tool is connected to perform the template's objective.

   The diagram in the following image is an example. When you create a toolchain, the diagram shows each tool integration that is part of the toolchain.

   

Step 2: Create a toolchain

1. Review the default information for the toolchain settings:

   • The toolchain's name identifies it in IBM Cloud. If you want to use a different name, change the toolchain's name.
   • The region to create the toolchain in. If you want to use a different region, select it from the list of available regions.
   • The resource group to create the toolchain in. If you want to use a different resource group, select it from the list of available resource groups.

2. Enter the requested information in each section of the template, as required. For more information about configuring the tool integrations, see Configuring tool integrations.

3. Click Create. Several steps run automatically to set up your toolchain. The tool integrations that are set up are different depending on which toolchain template you selected. For example, when you create a DevSecOps Continuous Integration (CI) toolchain, these steps are run:

   • The toolchain is created.
   • Delivery Pipelines are created and configured based on the information that you provided.
   • Source control repositories (repos) are configured for your inventory, compliance evidence, issue tracking, and a sample application for you to get started.
   • DevOps Insights and SonarQube are configured to run automatically in your pipeline.
   • If you configured a secrets management tool such as IBM® Key Protect for IBM Cloud®, IBM Cloud® Secrets Manager, or HashiCorp Vault, secrets such as API keys are securely stored and retrieved by your pipeline.
   • If you configured Slack, the toolchain is set up to send notifications about deployment status to the Slack channel that you specified.

After the toolchain is created, a notification appears that provides a link to a tutorial to learn more about how to use the template.

Next steps

Check out the available toolchain templates and tutorials.