Design Azure DevOps CI/CD pipeline with Git Flow

Author: JasonHsieh 謝帛軒 | jasonroy7dct

Date: 2021/05/23

Main purpose is to share the experiences with using Microsoft Azure DevOps in the client-side and the design of Azure DevOps pipeline.

Haha, this is here for my cover. Back in the day of Russia. Moscow, 2019

Simple introduction

Two projects have different purpose and target environment:

• Project A is aimed to deploy the application to Windows Server 2016
• Project B where I involved more is aimed to deploy the application to Red Hat OpenShift

Infrastructure as code

https://docs.microsoft.com/zh-tw/dotnet/architecture/cloud-native/infrastructure-as-code

• With IaC, you automate platform provisioning. You essentially apply software engineering practices such as testing and versioning to your DevOps practices
• You can use some scripts such as YAML or even in Azure DevOps you can use Classic Editor and then turn the sequence to YAML, JSON, etc.

Demo

• This demo section is for Project A
• Project A system information:
• Java 8 <java.version>1.8</java.version>
• Spring Boot
• SQL Server 2016
• Windows Server 2016
• Using two Git Repository(One is Main source code, another one is a git repository with firewall)

The flow chart of Git Flow with Azure DevOps CI/CD pipeline

The flow chart of CI/CD Trigger configs and deployment conditions

The whole sequence of CI/CD:

1. Developer push code to GitHub and trigger build pipeline

The continuous integration trigger can be set in build pipeline.So t depends on which branch 👨🏽‍💻 push.

For example, the build pipeline will be triggered if 👨🏽‍💻 push the code to his own branch and the code is merged into develop

Hence, the build pipeline source code can be designed as by repository or by branch.

Such as using by branch method and divided the environment into 4: DEV, SIT, UAT, PROD

SO that the branch names are going to be:

• DEV
• SIT
• UAT
• PROD

So if 👨🏽‍💻 want to build SIT source code, he has to check the code into branch SIT

⚠️However, if you have the condition of using two Git Repository with firewall issue, you may have to set the webHook or schedule the git pull/git push motion to push codes from one repository to another repository.

Push code from one Git Repository to another Git Repository

So you will have to use this command to push code to the target branch:

git push <repository_name> <source_branch>:<target_branch>

For example: push code from repo1 to repo2 on DEV branch

git push repo2 DEV:DEV

And with the settings of Continuous integration Trigger, the CI pipeline with start to build with the code check-in to repo2.

2. Build pipeline triggered and start to build source code

Every pipeline required an agent to run it, Microsoft divided it into Self-hosted and Microsoft-hosted

• Self-hosted agent run the pipeline with using your local resources
• Microsoft-hosted agent run the pipeline with using the resources provided by Microsoft
• In this demo I use Self-hosted agent in order to deploy the application on my localhost and client Windows Server

In this build pipeline(Maven build pipeline), the task 1 of agent job will run below command:

• mvn clean deploy -Dmaven.test.skip=true -PlocalDevOps=true
• task 2 will run Copy Files to: $(build.artifactstagingdirectory)
• task 3 will run Publish Artifact: buildArtifacts, this is for publishing the build artifacts onto DevOps Artifacts.
• Finished the process of build pipeline

3. Build pipeline finished and start the release pipeline to deploy the artifacts to the target environment

• When the build pipeline finished it will trigger the release pipeline.

• In this release pipeline, the stage 1 of agent job will run Download Artifacts:
• Stage 2 will start the command java -jar to deploy the application to target(localhost or Windows Server)

4. Deploy succeed and the CI/CD flow ended

• Checkout the deployment succeed or not via hostName:port
• For example localhost:8080 or hostName:8080

Finally it’s a wrap

First time sharing the Azure DevOps experiences, feel free to pull out some questions or comment below. Please let me know how can I improve in the near future!

Super sorry for my bad English lol, it has been quite a long time to write articles in English tho 😅

More information for Azure DevOps please reference Microsoft official documents: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/user-guide/what-is-azure-devops?view=azure-devops

Stay tuned for following updated 🤪