CI and CD are two acronyms frequently used in modern development practices and DevOps. CI stands for continuous integration, a fundamental DevOps best practice where developers frequently merge code changes into a central repository where automated builds and tests run.
Deploy CI is a web service that listens for http calls, and then executes an ansible playbook.
Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code.
An organized unit of scripts that defines work for a server configuration managed by the automation tool Ansible.
Deploy CI creates an API end point that gets hit and responds by executing and ansible play, the playbook can perform any set of tasks beyond just running tests and deployments. Possibilities are endless.
Setting It Up
The project can be cloned to a resource directory, e.g /usr/local/src.
From there the user can edit the Evironment File to addjust parameters like the port, the playbook to run and the user to run the play as.
The config file looks something like the following:
Environment=DEPLOY_PORT=5000
Environment=DEPLOY_ANSIBLE_FILE=/home/arthur/Documents/Dev/misc/deploy-ci/environment.conf
Environment=DEPLOY_USER=arthur
Alternatively the config parameters can be set during the creation of the systemd services file, e.g:
export DEPLOY_PORT=7000
export DEPLOY_ANSIBLE_FILE=/home/arthur/deployment.yml
export DEPLOY_USER=arthur
make setup
The above sequence of comands sets the values to be used as paramters when the make setup target runs.
NOTE: Environment variables set as export flags in the terminal tak precedence over the ones in the Evironment File.
After setting up the tool, it can be managed with systemd.