brigade

Brigade: Event-based Scripting for Kubernetes

Script simple and complex workflows using JavaScript. Chain together containers, running them in parallel or serially. Fire scripts based on times, GitHub events, Docker pushes, or any other trigger. Brigade is the tool for creating pipelines for Kubernetes.

• JavaScript scripting
• Project-based management
• Configurable event hooks
• Easy construction of pipelines
• Check out the docs to get started.

The Brigade Technology Stack

• Brigade ❤ JavaScript: Writing Brigade pipelines is as easy as writing a few lines of JavaScript.
• Brigade ❤ Kubernetes: Brigade is Kubernetes-native. Your builds are translated into pods, secrets, and services
• Brigade ❤ Docker: No need for special plugins or elaborate extensions. Brigade uses off-the-shelf Docker images to run your jobs. And Brigade also supports DockerHub webhooks.
• Brigade ❤ GitHub: Brigade comes with built-in support for GitHub, DockerHub, and other popular web services. And it can be easily extended to support your own services.

The design introduction introduces Brigade concepts and architecture.

Quickstart

Install Brigade

The easiest way to install Brigade into your Kubernetes cluster is to install it using Helm, the Kubernetes Package Manager.

# add Brigade chart repo
helm repo add brigade https://brigadecore.github.io/charts
# install Brigade - this also installs Kashti
helm install -n brigade brigade/brigade

You will now have Brigade installed. Kashti, the dashboard for your Brigade pipelines, is also installed in the cluster.

Install brig

Brig is the Brigade command line client. You can use brig to create/update/delete new brigade Projects, run Builds, etc. To get brig, navigate to the Releases page and then download the appropriate client for your platform. For example, if you're using Linux or WSL, you can get the 1.0.0 version in this way:

wget -O brig https://github.com/brigadecore/brigade/releases/download/v1.0.0/brig-linux-amd64
chmod +x brig
mv brig ~/bin

Alternatively, you can use asdf-brig to install & manage multiple versions of brig.

Creating A New Project

To create a new project, use brig project create and answer the prompts. Feel free to modify or leave all options at their defaults (just press Enter on every interactive prompt).

brig project create

Output would be similar to this:

? Project name brigadecore/empty-testbed
? Full repository name github.com/brigadecore/empty-testbed
? Clone URL (https://github.com/your/repo.git) https://github.com/brigadecore/empty-testbed.git
? Add secrets? No
Auto-generated a Shared Secret: "novxKi64FKWyvU4EPZulyo0o"
? Configure GitHub Access? No
? Configure advanced options No
Project ID: brigade-830c16d4aaf6f5490937ad719afd8490a5bcbef064d397411043ac

Here we're using the name 'brigadecore/empty-testbed' for our project, which points to a test repo on 'https://github.com/brigadecore/empty-testbed'. Of course, don't forget to give a proper name to your project, as well as set the 'Clone URL' correctly. If it's wrong, your subsequent Builds will fail! For documentation on project creation, check here.

Now we can view the newly created project:

brig project list

Output would be something like:

NAME                    ID                                                              REPO
myusername/myproject    brigade-2e9bb93bf149536a951d236772ae8be77a3cef9335c82bf39fc18c  github.com/myusername/myproject

You can also do a kubectl get secret to view the Kubernetes Secret that was created for this Project. Bear in mind that Brigade stores information about its entities (Project/Build) in Secrets.

NAME                                                             TYPE                                  DATA   AGE
brigade-2e9bb93bf149536a951d236772ae8be77a3cef9335c82bf39fc18c   brigade.sh/project                    24     2m
...other cluster Secrets...

Creating Your First Brigade Build

Conceptually, a Brigade Build is a set of instructions (written in JavaScript, in a file called brigade.js) that will run upon a triggering of an event. Events can be something like a git push, a Docker push or just a webhook. In this way, you can think of Builds as jobs/tasks/pipelines.

Let's now create a new file called brigade.js with the following content:

const { events, Job } = require("brigadier");
events.on("exec", () => {
  var job = new Job("do-nothing", "alpine:3.8");
  job.tasks = [
    "echo Hello",
    "echo World"
  ];

  job.run();
});

When the exec event is triggered, Brigade will create a Build based on this brigade.js file. This Build will create a single job that will start an image based on alpine:3.8 which will simply do a couple of echoes. The Kubernetes Pod that will be created to run this Build job will have a name starting with 'do-nothing'. As you can probably guess, a new Kubernetes Secret will also be created to store information about this Build.

Moreover, you can check out this tutorial for more on creating scripts.

Running a Build

To create and run a Brigade Build for the brigade.js file we wrote, we will use brig.

brig run brigadecore/empty-testbed -f brigade.js

This will trigger the exec event and show you the detailed output, which will be similar to this:

Event created. Waiting for worker pod named "brigade-worker-01d0y7bcxs6ke0yayrx6nbvm39".
Build: 01d0y7bcxs6ke0yayrx6nbvm39, Worker: brigade-worker-01d0y7bcxs6ke0yayrx6nbvm39
prestart: no dependencies file found
prestart: loading script from /etc/brigade/script
[brigade] brigade-worker version: 1.0.0
[brigade:k8s] Creating secret do-nothing-01d0y7bcxs6ke0yayrx6nbvm39
[brigade:k8s] Creating pod do-nothing-01d0y7bcxs6ke0yayrx6nbvm39
[brigade:k8s] Timeout set at 900000
[brigade:k8s] Pod not yet scheduled
[brigade:k8s] default/do-nothing-01d0y7bcxs6ke0yayrx6nbvm39 phase Pending
[brigade:k8s] default/do-nothing-01d0y7bcxs6ke0yayrx6nbvm39 phase Succeeded
done

As you can see, Brigade created a new pod for this Build (called do-nothing-01d0y7bcxs6ke0yayrx6nbvm39) that executed our job. Let's get its logs.

kubectl logs do-nothing-01d0y7bcxs6ke0yayrx6nbvm39

Output:

Hello
world

Moreover, you can get the details for this Build from brig.

brig build list

Output:

ID                              TYPE    PROVIDER        PROJECT                                                         STATUS          AGE
01d0y7bcxs6ke0yayrx6nbvm39      exec    brigade-cli     brigade-830c16d4aaf6f5490937ad719afd8490a5bcbef064d397411043ac  Succeeded       4m

You can also see this Project/Build output combination in Kashti. Kashti is by default visible only from within the cluster, so you need a kubectl port-forward from your local machine to the Kubernetes Service for Kashti.

kubectl port-forward service/brigade-kashti 8000:80

Then, you can navigate to http://localhost:8000 to see Kashti dashboard with your Project and Build.

Brigade contains a utility (called vacuum) that runs as a Kubernetes CronJob and periodically (default: hourly) deletes Builds (i.e. corresponding Secrets and Pods). You can run kubectl get cronjob to get its details and possible configure it.

Cleanup

To remove created resources:

# delete project
brig  project delete brigadecore/empty-testbed
# remove Brigade
helm delete brigade --purge

Related Projects

• Kashti - a dashboard for your Brigade pipelines.
• Brigadeterm - a simple terminal ui for brigade pipelining system.
• Brigade exporter - a Prometheus exporter to gather metrics from Brigade.
• Gateways
  • BitBucket events: Gateway Support for BitBucket repositories
  • GitLab events: Gateway Support for GitLab repositories
  • Kubernetes events: Gateway that listens to Kubernetes event stream
  • Event Grid gateway: Gateway for Azure Event Grid events
  • Cron Gateway: Schedule events to run at a particular time
  • Trello and Generic Webhooks: Experimental gateway for Trello and for generic webhooks
  • Draft Pack for Building Custom Gateways: Build your own gateway in 5 minutes
  • Azure DevOps / VSTS gateway: Gateway for Azure DevOps / VSTS events

Brigade ❤ Developers

To get started head to the developer's guide

Brigade is well-tested on Minikube and Azure Kubernetes Service.

Contributing

The Brigade project accepts contributions via GitHub pull requests. The Contributing document outlines the process to help get your contribution accepted.

Support & Feedback

We have a slack channel! Kubernetes/#brigade Feel free to join for any support questions or feedback, we are happy to help. To report an issue or to request a feature open an issue here