CI/CD Pipeline with Gogs, Drone, and Kubernetes

In this write-up, I will be using open-source software’s to build a fully functional CI/CD pipeline that allows you to take code from a repository, build, commit, publish and deploy docker based images onto a Kubernetes 1.18 cluster – all by issuing in a git commit to your repository.

Building Sandbox (Developer Box)

Sandbox is a CentOS 7.3 based host, which serves applications you need in the CI/CD pipeline.

Software Available on the Sandbox:

· Gnome Desktop

· Docker Daemon and Engine

· git tools

· pyenv

· Python 2.7

· pip

· virtualenv

· drone command line tool

· PyCharm (Community)

· node version manager (nvm)

· node v6.9.2 (LTS)

CI/CD Pipeline workflow

Gogs - Self-Hosted Git Service (https://gogs.io/)

Drone - Continuous Delivery System (https://www.drone.io/)

Kubernetes – Container Management Platform (https://kubernetes.io/)

In this CI/CD environment the developer can:

1. Store, commit and manage your code in Gogs

2. Automatically build a docker container from a code repository, using Drone

3. Automatically store that container on Docker Registry, using Drone

4. Automatically deploy the container to a Kubernetes pod!

Gogs:

Gogs is a private source code control system anyone can deploy locally, written in Go. I use it as a public GitHub alternative here.

We can create, manage and commit our code exactly as we would with GitHub. With this CI/CD Pipeline, we can then quickly see our code built into a container and deployed automatically onto Kubernetes by Drone.

Drone:

Drone is a CI/CD tool, which can pull our code from Gogs and build/publish/deploy it to Kubernetes nodes or other targets.

For Drone to be able to know how to execute a CI/CD pipeline for us, it uses three main stages:

Build - Builds your code from a repo kept in a store like Gogs
Publish - Takes our code, builds it into a container, and pushes it to a container repo like Docker Hub
Deploy - Deploys the container from the repo to the target platform - e.g., Kubernetes.

There are many other options here, but these are the main items.

Drone expects these stages to be built into a .yml file.

pipeline:
  publish:
    image: plugins/docker
    dockerfile: Dockerfile
    repo: drone:5000/busybox-sandeep
    registry: drone:5000
    insecure: true
    tags: "${DRONE_BUILD_NUMBER}"
  deploy:
    image:  devnetsandbox/kube
    kubernetes_server: http://master:8001
    kubernetes_token: <Your Kubernetes Token>
    namespace: default
    deployment: application1
    container: busybox-sandeep
    repo: drone:5000/ busybox-sandeep
    registry: drone:5000
    insecure: true
    tag: "${DRONE_BUILD_NUMBER}"

Create Docker File in the repository