Tekton — Build a pipeline on Kubernetes cloud native CI/CD tools

Tekton as a Kubernetes cloud native CI/CD tools is seamlessly integrates with Kubernetes, offering enhanced scalability, portability, and automation. It leverages Kubernetes’ orchestration capabilities to efficiently manage CI/CD pipelines, making it a powerful choice for cloud-native application development and deployment.

To gain a better understanding of the CI/CD pipeline workflow, practical experience is useful and good to understand how the step it goes.

Let’s get start at Environment setup

The blog here we are following the Tekton website instruction to setup a Tekton environment and builds a pipeline.

Installation minikube by Local Kubernetes, minikube facilitates local Kubernetes cluster development and testing. Follow these steps for installation:

First of all, install the docker. the error could come like below if no docker pre-install on the machine.

Docker Permission

1. Modify the premission of the docker file path, sudo chmod 666 /var/run/docker.sock. The docker.sock is the file interact the Docker daemon connection.
2. create a docker group by “sudo groupadd docker”, Add your user to the docker group “sudo usermod -aG docker ${USER}”

Testing with the “minikube start” command, the Minikube service has been successfully initiated.

Let’s take a look how we could Interact with kubenetes cluster.

• kubectl get po -A, list the requested object(s) across all namespaces of pods

• minikube delete, could use after the pipeline have finished.

• minikube dashboard, provide visibility of Kubernetes dashboard running within the minikube cluster

At the lab time using the minikube version: v1.31.2 and the list of the commands as below.

tektonuser@Tekton202310:~$ minikube --help
minikube provisions and manages local Kubernetes clusters optimized for development workflows.

Basic Commands:
  start            Starts a local Kubernetes cluster
  status           Gets the status of a local Kubernetes cluster
  stop             Stops a running local Kubernetes cluster
  delete           Deletes a local Kubernetes cluster
  dashboard        Access the Kubernetes dashboard running within the minikube cluster
  pause            pause Kubernetes
  unpause          unpause Kubernetes

Images Commands:
  docker-env       Provides instructions to point your terminal's docker-cli to the Docker Engine inside minikube.
(Useful for building docker images directly inside minikube)
  podman-env       Configure environment to use minikube's Podman service
  cache            Manage cache for images
  image            Manage images

Configuration and Management Commands:
  addons           Enable or disable a minikube addon
  config           Modify persistent configuration values
  profile          Get or list the current profiles (clusters)
  update-context   Update kubeconfig in case of an IP or port change

Networking and Connectivity Commands:
  service          Returns a URL to connect to a service
  tunnel           Connect to LoadBalancer services

Advanced Commands:
  mount            Mounts the specified directory into minikube
  ssh              Log into the minikube environment (for debugging)
  kubectl          Run a kubectl binary matching the cluster version
  node             Add, remove, or list additional nodes
  cp               Copy the specified file into minikube

Troubleshooting Commands:
  ssh-key          Retrieve the ssh identity key path of the specified node
  ssh-host         Retrieve the ssh host key of the specified node
  ip               Retrieves the IP address of the specified node
  logs             Returns logs to debug a local Kubernetes cluster
  update-check     Print current and latest version number
  version          Print the version of minikube
  options          Show a list of global command-line options (applies to all commands).

Other Commands:
  completion       Generate command completion for a shell
  license          Outputs the licenses of dependencies to a directory

Use "minikube <command> --help" for more information about a given command.

Start service with Minikube

1. Interact with local Kubernetes cluster using kubectl, create a deployment by running “kubectl create deployment hello-minikube --image=kicbase/echo-server:1.0”
2. Exposing a service using “kubectl expose deployment hello-minikube --type=NodePort --port=8080”
3. Open the exposed endpoint use the following command “minikube service hello-minikube”

As the browser will pop up and display the service, it appears to be working, and the service is up and running.

Install Tekton Pipelines

1. Install Tekon Pipelines on a Kubernetes cluster as latest official release “kubectl apply --filename https://storage.googleapis.com/tekton-releases/pipeline/latest/release.yaml”.
2. Monitor the installation by using “kubectl get pods --namespace tekton-pipelines --watch”

Once tekton-pipelines-controller and tekton-pipelines-webhook show 1/1 under the READY column. The Tekton pipeline is ready, then move forward to create task.

Tekton pipelines have many entity, one of the need-to-know entity is task. Task defines a series of steps, related ingest specific inputs and produce specific outputs.

Let’s follow step by step to run the task, create a task named hello-world.yaml and taskrun hello-world-run.yaml as follow.

apiVersion: tekton.dev/v1beta1
kind: Task
metadata:
  name: hello
spec:
  steps:
    - name: echo
      image: alpine
      script: |
        #!/bin/sh
        echo "Hello World"

apiVersion: tekton.dev/v1beta1
kind: TaskRun
metadata:
  name: hello-task-run
spec:
  taskRef:
    name: hello

1. Apply the changes your cluster by using “kubectl apply --filename hello-world.yaml”.
2. Apply the changes to your cluster to launch the task “kubectl apply --filename hello-world-run.yaml”.
3. Verify the taskrun success by using “kubectl get taskrun hello-task-run”
4. Verify the Hello world could display by look at the logs “
   kubectl logs --selector=tekton.dev/taskRun=hello-task-run”

Apply task change to cluster

Apply runtask change to cluster

Verify the status and output

Hello World is running well as expected.

Clone a public git repository with Tekton

Request for Installation: kubectl, Tekton Pipelines, and Tekton CLI

Install the Tekton CLI “tkn”, on your machine. tkn is available on Linux as a .deb package. curl to download the deb package and dpkg install the package.

root@Tekton202310:/home/tektonuser# curl -LO https://github.com/tektoncd/cli/releases/download/v0.32.2/tektoncd-cli-0.32.2_Linux-64bit.deb
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:--  0:00:01 --:--:--     0
100 28.5M  100 28.5M    0     0  2986k      0  0:00:09  0:00:09 --:--:-- 6488k
root@Tekton202310:/home/tektonuser# sudo dpkg -i ./tektoncd-cli-0.32.2_Linux-64bit.deb
Selecting previously unselected package cli.
(Reading database ... 208803 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../tektoncd-cli-0.32.2_Linux-64bit.deb ...
Unpacking cli (0.32.2) ...
Setting up cli (0.32.2) ...

List of tkn pipelinerun commands reference as below:

tektonuser@Tekton202310:~/example1$ tkn pipelinerun
Manage PipelineRuns

Usage:
tkn pipelinerun [flags]
tkn pipelinerun [command]

Aliases:
  pipelinerun, pr, pipelineruns

Available Commands:
  cancel      Cancel a PipelineRun in a namespace
  delete      Delete PipelineRuns in a namespace
  describe    Describe a PipelineRun in a namespace
  export      Export PipelineRun
  list        Lists PipelineRuns in a namespace
  logs        Show the logs of a PipelineRun

Flags:
  -c, --context string      name of the kubeconfig context to use (default: kubectl config current-context)
  -h, --help                help for pipelinerun
  -k, --kubeconfig string   kubectl config file (default: $HOME/.kube/config)
  -n, --namespace string    namespace to use (default: from $KUBECONFIG)
  -C, --no-color            disable coloring (default: false)

Use "tkn pipelinerun [command] --help" for more information about a command.

Following the previous session, let’s continue by setting up and executing tasks step by step. Create three YAML files: Pipeline.yaml, PipelineRun.yaml, and show-readme.yaml, as outlined below.

apiVersion: tekton.dev/v1beta1
kind: Pipeline
metadata:
  name: clone-read
spec:
  description: | 
    This pipeline clones a git repo, then echoes the README file to the stout.
  params:
  - name: repo-url
    type: string
    description: The git repo URL to clone from.
  workspaces:
  - name: shared-data
    description: | 
      This workspace contains the cloned repo files, so they can be read by the
      next task.
  - name: git-credentials
    description: My ssh credentials
  tasks:
  - name: fetch-source
    taskRef:
      name: git-clone
    workspaces:
    - name: output
      workspace: shared-data
    - name: ssh-directory
      workspace: git-credentials
    params:
    - name: url
      value: $(params.repo-url)
  - name: show-readme
    runAfter: ["fetch-source"]
    taskRef:
      name: show-readme
    workspaces:
    - name: source
      workspace: shared-data

apiVersion: tekton.dev/v1beta1
kind: PipelineRun
metadata:
  generateName: clone-read-run-
spec:
  pipelineRef:
    name: clone-read
  podTemplate:
    securityContext:
      fsGroup: 65532
  workspaces:
  - name: shared-data
    volumeClaimTemplate:
      spec:
        accessModes:
        - ReadWriteOnce
        resources:
          requests:
            storage: 1Gi
  - name: git-credentials
    secret:
      secretName: git-credentials
  params:
  - name: repo-url
    value: git@github.com:tektoncd/website.git

apiVersion: tekton.dev/v1beta1
kind: Task
metadata:
  name: show-readme
spec:
  description: Read and display README file.
  workspaces:
  - name: source
  steps:
  - name: read
    image: alpine:latest
    script: | 
      #!/usr/bin/env sh
      cat $(workspaces.source.path)/README.md

Before go to next step, it could verify if the client version and pipeline version have installed by using “tkn version”. Then install a git clone task from tekton hub by using “tkn hub install task git-clone” or “kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tektoncd/catalog/main/task/git-clone/0.6/git-clone.yaml”.

tkn install

kubectl install

1. Apply the readme by “kubectl apply -f show-readme.yaml”
2. Apply the readme by “kubectl apply -f pipeline.yaml”
3. Create the pipelinerun by “kubectl create -f pipelinerun.yaml”
4. Use the PipelineRun name from the output of the previous step to monitor the Pipeline execution “tkn pipelinerun logs clone-read-run-76mfq -f”

Clone a git repository with Tekton success!! It can refer to the documentation available on the Tekton website and it is nice to have a try. Now, one more another CI/CD tool for enhance pipeline.