Common Patterns and Best Practices

These are the habits that make Gofer pipelines easy to run and easy to trust. Most of them come from the same facts: every task is its own container, possibly on a different machine, and Gofer only knows what you tell it. It also doesn't tie pipelines to a git repository.

Here's everything at a glance:

Writing Tasks

• Make tasks safe to run twice.
• Take configuration from environment variables.
• Pin your image tags.
• Keep your images lean.
• Fail loudly.

Designing Pipelines

• Keep things simple.
• Use Any for cleanup and notifications.
• Limit pipelines that can't overlap.
• Keep your pipeline config next to your code.

Passing Data Between Tasks

• Small values
• Files and directories
• Things that trip people up

Working with Git Repositories

• Getting access
• Getting the code

Secrets and Access

• Prefer pipeline secrets over global ones.
• Only give API tokens to tasks that need them.