Tapping into the Zeitgeist

A while ago there was a contest to develop a plugin for a Continuous Delivery system called Go.

I decided to "have a go," and my product was judged to be the best suited to the criteria of the competition.

When I was first contemplating producing something a colleague suggested that I  do something with Docker because that was the hot technology at the time.  Instead I opted for something that I believed would benefit my team in our use of Cloud Foundry.

Rather than going for the obvious - automating deployment to Cloud Foundry - I chose to give developers a system which could alert their CI pipeline when an app has been re-deployed.

Github doesn't seem to give statistics on downloads, so I find myself a little frustrated at not being able to tell how many people are actually making use of my first serious foray into open source software.

Go CD Cloud Foundry plugin

In February 2015 I developed a Go CD server plugin to enable triggering of builds when a Cloud Foundry application has been deployed.

This post is intended as an introduction to how to use this plugin.

A starting assumption is that you already have the plugin installed on your Go CD server.

Update: Binary jars are available:
https://github.com/stephen-souness-springer/springer-gocd-cloudfoundry-plugin/releases

The source code is also available on Github:
https://github.com/stephen-souness-springer/springer-gocd-cloudfoundry-plugin


Step 1

Navigate to the Package Repositories section of the Admin menu

Add a new repository with your CloudFoundry API credentials.

Update: In version 1.0.1 the password property has changed to be secured - so you won't see it in cleartext the way is is shown here.

To make sure that you have supplied the correct credentials - and confirm that your Go server can connect to Cloud Foundry you can use the Check Connection button before choosing to save the configuration.


You're now ready to include some Cloud Foundry configuration to a build pipeline with your newly available repository.

Step 2

The Check Package button will trigger a check on two levels - first that the supplied credentials can log in, and second that an application exists which starts with the specified App Name.

Step 3

The next step in your pipeline definition depends on what you want to do when a change is detected.  From the example settings above there will be an environment variable called GO_PACKAGE_MYCLOUDFOUNDRYDEV_SERVICEX_LABEL set with the latest matching detected app version.