The Shippable Blog

Most customers use nodes provided by Shippable to run their CI/CD workflows. However, you also have another option called Custom Nodes, which allows you to attach your own build nodes, which can be inside your VPC and/or behind your firewall, to run your CI/CD workflows. 

Custom nodes provide many key advantages:

• Security: Your build machines can be inside your VPC and/or behind your firewall, which gives you the ability to configure access, IAM, etc. We even have a way of configuring these machines so that you do not have to grant Shippable SSH access! This means your code never leaves your firewall and no external entity can access your machines.
• Faster build times: You can leave your build machines running all the time, which eliminates the occasional 2-3 mins per build that is added when new machines are spun up on Shippable's hosted infrastructure.
• Docker caching: If you use Docker for your build workflows like pulling Docker images from a registry or building Docker images, your build machines will already have these images and this will speed up your builds.

In addition to publicly available packages, npm also allows users to publish and manage packages in a private namespace. If you want your npm install command in the CI workflow to install your private dependencies, there are a couple of setup steps that are required.

Unless you follow these steps, your npm install command will throw an error, such as 

  npm ERR! 404 Not found : @manishas/my-private-module   

Step 1: Get your npm auth token

First, you need to find your npm token, which is stored in the .npmrc file in your home directory. The file will contain a line which looks like this:

  //registry.npmjs.org/:_authToken=GFYR$E8D-89DG-GH54-HJDR-TYDGOSYT785T  

Copy the value of the token, which is everything after authToken=

Many Shippable customers create branches on their source control repository in order to work on new features.

Let's take an example of two developers, Ted and Mary,  who're going to work on Feature #42 for the FooApp application. Their feature branch workflow will look something like this:

1. Ted creates a feature branch off the master branch. He calls the new branch feature-42
2. Ted and Mary commit code changes to feature-42
3. When coding for Feature #42 is complete, Mary sends a pull request to merge feature-42 into master 
4. A dev lead reviews the pull request.and if everything looks good, merges the code into master
5. If the merged code passes all checks, feature-42 is deleted

Fig 1: Gitflow workflow

The Atlassian team has written a more detailed description of the feature branch and Gitflow workflow which explains how to handle it from a source control provider perspective: 

• Feature Branch Workflow 
• Gitflow workflow

Let us look into how you can configure your Continuous Integration (CI) platform to handle these scenarios. In this example, we'll use Shippable's native CI functionality. 

We recently had the pleasure of talking to Eric Vanderburg, the cyber security and DevOps expert to understand his viewpoints on DevOps, the digital transformation of workforces and legacy systems to cloud and community-based models. 

What's in a name? wrote the greatest Bard that ever lived.

He was wrong. If someone ever asked me a hypothetical question about which dead person I'd want to have a conversation with, it'll definitely be Shakespeare. Let me explain why.

When we launched Shippable Pipelines last year, we wanted to highlight the difference between plain vanilla CI and the capability to put together a deployment "pipeline" that spans orchestration across multiple environments and supports all tasks involved in software delivery like CI, infrastructure provisioning, test automation, deployments, security patching, release management, config mgmt, service discovery, etc. 

However, shortly after we launched, other CI providers launched their own interpretations of "pipelines"! For example,

• Jenkins 2.0 pipelines 
• CircleCI workflows
  
• Bitbucket pipelines
• And so on...

How did everyone come to the same exact place so rapidly? As we found out, they didn't. Pipelines was being used as a fancy name for CI, with features that Shippable had supported for over two years, like Matrix builds for splitting tests or testing against multiple environments for example. 

We needed a way to explain why Shippable is different. This blog explains why we landed on DevOps Assembly Lines as the perfect way to describe our approach to DevOps and CI/CD.