Tools container¶
The tools-container is an essential part of Grove, used by the CI/CD pipelines, providing a wrapper for the tooling. Furthermore, Grove's CLI command is installed within the Docker container defined by tools-container. This setup ensures we are not polluting the user's environment with commands it may not need.
Integration with CI/CD pipelines¶
The CI/CD pipelines are tied to a specific tools-container version. Although the default version is set in the tools-container/ci_vars.yml file of Grove, it can be pinned by changing either of the TOOLS_CONTAINER_IMAGE_NAME or TOOLS_CONTAINER_IMAGE_VERSION variables in the CI/CD settings of the given GitLab project.
Creating branch specific version¶
When the CI/CD test pipeline is running for Grove, the first step is building and publishing the tools-container image. In most cases, it is not needed to build the image, hence it must be triggered manually.
Therefore, in case you need to test a pipeline with changes on a given Grove branch, simply click the "play icon" for building the image and triggering that pipeline step.
Temporary version override¶
The tools-container version is integrated with the CI/CD pipeline, though this causes a deadlock when a feature development depends on a new container version. If the version is set in the general CI/CD variables, it would affect the whole repository. To resolve this deadlock, there is a possibility to temporarily override the setting for a given pipeline run, leaving the other pipelines intact.
To set a temporary override, follow the instructions below:
- navigate to the Grove cluster repository
- on the left hand side, click the "CI/CD" menu item, then "Pipelines"
- click on "Run pipeline" close to the upper right corner
- select the desired branch to run the pipeline on
- after selecting the branch, set the desired environment variable name and value
- lastly, click on "Run pipeline"
The new pipeline run will have the overridden tools-container version and will download that from the docker registry.