IBM Cloud Docs
Building and deploying

Building and deploying

IBM Cloud® Continuous Delivery includes Delivery Pipeline, which you can use to implement a repeatable continuous integration and continuous delivery process.

Complete the following tasks to configure a pipeline.

Adding a stage

  1. On the Pipeline page, click ADD STAGE. The Stage Configuration page opens.

  2. Configure the stage.

    a. On the INPUT tab, select an input for the stage. For Build stages, the input tab includes a Branch field to specify the branch in the repo to use for input.

    b. On the JOBS tab, add and configure at least one job. The first stage usually has at least a build job.

  3. Click SAVE.

Adding a job to a stage

  1. On the stage, click the Stage Configuration icon, and then click Configure Stage.
  2. Click the JOBS tab.
  3. Click ADD JOB. Select the type of job to add.
  4. Configure the job.
  5. Click SAVE.

Adding a job to a stage
Figure 1. Adding a job to a stage

Running a stage

You can manually run a stage by clicking the Run Stage icon on the Pipeline page.

Clicking the Run Stage icon on a stage
Figure 2. Running a stage

You can also request on-demand builds and deployments from the build history page in one of two ways:

  • Drag a build to the box that is under a configured stage.
  • In the LAST EXECUTION RESULT section, click the Send to icon and then select a space to deploy to.

The Execute stage with this build icon
Figure 3. Deploying a stage

To cancel a running stage, on the stage, click View logs and history. In the list of jobs, click the running job's number and then click CANCEL. You can also cancel jobs individually by clicking a job and then clicking CANCEL, or by clicking the Stop icon for a job on its stage.

Deploying an app

A properly configured deploy job deploys your app to your target whenever the job is run. To manually run a deploy job, click the Run Stage icon of the stage that the job is in.

Input revisions

When you run a stage manually, or if it runs because the stage before it is completed, the running stage selects its input revision. Usually, the input revision is a build number. To select the input revision, the stage follows these conditions:

  • If a specific revision is selected, use it.
  • If a specific revision is not specified, search previous stages until a stage is found that uses the same input. Find and use the last successfully run revision of that input.
  • If a specific revision is not specified and no other stages use the specified source as input, use the latest revision of the input.

You can deploy a previous build. On the stage that contains the build, click View logs and history. On the page that opens, click to expand the run number and then click the build job. Click SEND TO, and select a target.

Adding services to apps

You can add services to your apps and manage those services from your IBM Cloud dashboard. For more information about adding services, see Connecting services to external apps.

Viewing logs

You can view the logs for jobs and view stages as they are running on the Stage History page.

  1. To view a job's log, click the job. Alternatively, on a stage, click View logs and history.

  2. To view the runtime log of a deployed application, click View runtime log.

    In addition to job logs, you can view unit test results, generated artifacts, and code changes for any build job.

    You can also run, redeploy, cancel, or configure a stage from the Stage History page. Click RUN to run the stage, REDEPLOY to redeploy if it is a deployment job, or CONFIGURE to configure a stage. While a stage is running, you can cancel it by clicking the run number and then clicking CANCEL.

Downloading logs from a script

You can download the log file for a pipeline job from a script and save the PIPELINE_LOG_URL that is provided while the pipeline job is running. The following example shows the steps to upload the pipeline job's log file to a different system.

  1. Set up a JOB_LOG environment property for your stage.

  2. In your pipeline job, save the PIPELINE_LOG_URL.

    export JOB_LOG="$PIPELINE_LOG_URL"

  3. Use the PIPELINE_LOG_URL in a later job within the same stage to download the log file to export it to a different system. Use an IBM Cloud bearer token to access the log file.

    ibmcloud login -a cloud.ibm.com \
  --apikey <INSERT API KEY HERE>

BEARER=$( ibmcloud iam oauth-tokens | grep "IAM token" | sed 's/^.*Bearer //g' )

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $BEARER"  \
  -H "Accept: text/plain" \
  -D /tmp/headers.txt \
  -o job_log.txt \
  "$JOB_LOG"

  4. Check the X-More-Data header. If the header is set to true, the log file is being generated or processed. If the header is set to false, the log file is ready for use.

    grep X-More-Data /tmp/headers.txt
X-More-Data: false

  5. Upload the log file to your system.

    scp job_log.txt user@example.org:/job1/logs

Downloading artifacts from a script

You can download the artifacts for a pipeline Build job from a script and save the PIPELINE_ARTIFACT_URL that is provided while the pipeline job is running. The following example shows the steps to upload the pipeline job's artifacts to a different system.

  1. Set up a JOB_ARTIFACT environment property for your stage.

  2. In your pipeline job, save the PIPELINE_ARTIFACT_URL.

    export JOB_ARTIFACT="$PIPELINE_ARTIFACT_URL"

  3. Use the PIPELINE_ARTIFACT_URL in a later job within the same stage to download the artifacts to export them to a different system. Use an IBM Cloud bearer token to access the artifacts.

    ibmcloud login -a cloud.ibm.com \
  --apikey <INSERT API KEY HERE>

BEARER=$( ibmcloud iam oauth-tokens | grep "IAM token" | sed 's/^.*Bearer //g' )

DOWNLOAD_URL=$( curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $BEARER"  \
  "$JOB_ARTIFACT" )

curl -O  "$DOWNLOAD_URL"

  4. Upload the artifacts to your system.

    scp $(basename "$DOWNLOAD_URL") user@example.org:/job1/artifacts