Advance Usages

This section will show many advance usages of Foremast.

Environment Variables

These are environment variables used when executing Foremast

TRIGGER_JOB: The name of the Jenkins job that Spinnaker should look for as a trigger
APPNAME: The full name of your application in Spinnaker. ${GIT_REPO}${PROJECT} is default
EMAIL: Email address associated with application in Spinnaker
PROJECT: The namespace or group of the application being set up
GIT_REPO: The name of the repo in the above namespace/group
RUNWAY_DIR: Path to the pipeline.json and application-master-$account.json files created above

Pipeline Configs

The pipeline.json and application-master-$account.json are critical files that determine on how each application in the pipeline will work. We recommend keeping these files in the same repository as your application but as long as they are on the same local machine as the Foremast runner they can be used.

In ~/runway create a file pipeline.json with the contents:

{
    "deployment": "spinnaker",
    "env": [ "account1", "account2"]
}

In the same ~/runway directory, create a file application-master-$account.json where $account is the same name as an account in your AWS credentials file and in your env list in pipeline.json. This file can be empty and it will just use the defaults provided at application-master-$account.json.

Note: You will need an application-master-$account.json config for each $account that you are deploying to.

See pipeline.json and application-master-$account.json for all configuration options.

Running Foremast

After setting up all of the configs there are a couple of ways to run Foremast components. You can use our bundled CLI endpoints that look at environment variables, or you can call each individual component with appropriate arguments on the CLI

Both methods will generate the same outcome. An application created in Spinnaker and a pipeline generated based on the configs.

Method 1

This is the recommended method on how to run Foremast. You need to first set the environment variables from above.

With the environment variables defined, you can simply run the command foremast-pipeline from the command line. This will create the Application in Spinnaker as well as generate a base pipeline.

Method 2

This method is more explicit and requires calling multiple Foremast components to create the configs, create the application, and generate the pipeline:

create-configs -o ./raw.properties -g ${PROJECT}/${GIT_REPO} -r ${RUNWAY_DIR}

create-app -a ${APPNAME} --email ${EMAIL} --project ${PROJECT} --repo ${GIT_REPO}

create-pipeline -a ${APPNAME} --triggerjob ${TRIGGER_JOB}

Next Steps

Take a look at the Infrastructure docs for details on the necessary Jenkins jobs.

Since Foremast is based on Jinja templates, it can be extended to do anything you need. For example, you can add functionality for creating scaling policies, setting up AWS infrastructure (elbs, security groups, iam policies, s3 buckets), sending slack notifications, and destroying old infrastructure. Take a look at our internal workflow docs for more detail on how Foremast is used at various organizations!