Create Your First Pipeline Configuration

Before you can start running containers you must tell Gofer what you want to run. To do this we create what is called a pipeline configuration.

The creation of this pipeline configuration is very easy and can be done in either Golang or Rust. This allows you to use a fully-featured programming language to organize your pipelines, instead of dealing with YAML mess.

Let's Go!

As an example, let's just copy a pipeline that has been given to us already. We'll use Go as our language, which means you'll need to install it if you don't have it. The Gofer repository gives us a simple pipeline that we can copy and use.

Let's first create a folder where we'll put our pipeline:

mkdir /tmp/simple_pipeline

Then let's copy the Gofer provided pipeline's main file into the correct place:

cd /tmp/simple_pipeline
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/clintjedwards/gofer/main/examplePipelines/go/simple/main.go

This should create a main.go file inside our /tmp/simple_pipeline directory.

Lastly, let's initialize the new Golang program:

To complete our Go program we simply have to initialize it with the go mod command.

go mod init test/simple_pipeline
go mod tidy

What is in it?

Here is main.go with its long description shortened:

package main

import (
	"log"

	sdk "github.com/clintjedwards/gofer/sdk/go/config"
)

func main() {
	err := sdk.NewPipeline("simple", "Simple Pipeline").
		Description("This pipeline shows off a very simple Gofer pipeline...").
		Tasks(
			sdk.NewTask("simple-task", "ubuntu:latest").
				Description("This task simply prints our hello-world message and exits!").
				Command("echo", "Hello from Gofer!").Variables(map[string]string{"test": "sample"}),
		).Finish()
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
}

A pipeline consists of a few parts:

• An id and a name. simple is the id you'll use in commands; "Simple Pipeline" is the name people see.
• A description so others know what it's for.
• One or more tasks. Each task is a container to run. This one runs ubuntu:latest, prints a message, and gets an environment variable TEST=sample.
• Finish(), which checks the pipeline for mistakes and prints it out.

Try it

A pipeline config is an ordinary program, so you can run it yourself:

go run .

It prints your pipeline as JSON. That JSON is what Gofer actually receives; in the next step, gofer up runs this program for you and uploads what it prints. If something is wrong with the pipeline, like a task that depends on one that doesn't exist, go run . tells you here before anything reaches Gofer.