Receiving artifacts from GitHub

This guide explains how to configure Spinnaker to trigger pipelines based on commits to a GitHub repostory and inject changed GitHub files as artifacts into a pipeline.

This functionality uses GitHub Webhooks for delivering messages to Spinnaker, and must be configured to send messages to Spinnaker’s event bus as shown below.

Prerequisite configuration/setup

If you (or your Spinnaker admin) have already configured Spinnaker to listen to a GitHub webhooks from the repository you plan to publish commits to, you can skip this section.

You need the following:

• A GitHub repository either under your user, or in an organization or user’s account that you have permission to publish commits to.

  This will be referred to as $ORGANIZATION/$REPOSITORY from now on (e.g. spinnaker/clouddriver).

• A running Spinnaker instance. This guide shows you how to update it to accept messages from GitHub.

At this point, we will configure GitHub webhooks, and a GitHub artifact account. The intent is that the webhook will be received by Spinnaker whenever a commit is made, and the artifact account will allow you to download any pertinent files.

1. Configure GitHub webhooks

Follow the GitHub webhook configuration.

2. Configure a GitHub artifact account

Follow the GitHub artifact configuration.

3. Apply your configuration changes

Once the artifact changes have been made using Halyard, run

hal deploy apply

to apply them in Spinnaker.

Using GitHub artifacts in pipelines

We will need either an existing or a new pipeline that we want to be triggered on changes to GitHub artifacts. If you do not have a pipeline, create one as shown below.

You can create and edit pipelines in the Pipelines tab of Spinnaker

Configure the GitHub artifact

Once you have your pipeline ready, we need to declare that this pipeline expects to have a specific artifact matching some criteria available before the pipeline starts executing. In doing so, you guarantee that an artifact matching your description is present in the pipeline’s execution context. If no artifact for this description is present, the pipeline won’t start.

Now to configure the artifact, change the “Custom” dropdown to “GitHub”, and enter the File path field. Note: this path can be a regex. You can, for example, set the object path to be folder/.*\.yml to trigger on any change to a YAML file inside folder in your repository.

Configure the GitHub trigger

Now that the expected artifact has been added, let’s add a Git trigger to run our pipeline. To configure the trigger:

Field	Value
Type	“Git”
Repo Type	“GitHub”
Organization or User	$ORGANIZATION from above
Project	$REPOSITORY from above
Branch	(optional) Can be used (via regex) to describe which branches to listen to changes one
Secret	(optional) Strongly encouraged It must match the secret provided to the webhook configuration
Expected Artifacts	Must reference the artifact defined previously

By setting the Expected Artifacts field in the trigger config, you guarantee that git webhooks will only trigger this pipeline when an artifact matching your requirements is present in the commit.

Test the pipeline

If you add or modify a file matching your expected artifact to the configured repository, it should execute. If it doesn’t, you can start by checking the logs of the Echo service.