The Relation Between Application and Environment Pipelines

Keep in mind that I am aware we haven’t gone into detail on the application pipeline, that’s coming soon. Right now, we’ll focus on the overall flow between the two.

The flow from a commit to the master branch to deployment to the staging environment

Everything starts with a push into the master branch of an application repository (e.g., go-demo-6). That push might be direct or through a pull request. For now, what matters is that something is pushed to the master branch.

A push to any branch initiates a webhook request to Jenkins X. It does not matter much whether the destination is Jenkins itself, Prow, or something else. We haven’t gone through different ways we can define webhook endpoints. What matters is that the webhook might initiate activity that performs a set of steps defined in jenkins-x.yml residing in the repository that launched the process. Such an activity might do nothing if jenkins-x.yml ignores that branch, it might execute only a fraction of the steps, or it might run all of them. It all depends on the branch filters. In this case, we’re concerned with the steps defined to run when a push is done on the master branch of an application.

From a very high level, a push from the master branch of an application initiates a build that checks out the code, builds binaries (e.g., container image, Helm chart), makes a release and pushes it to registries (e.g., container registry, Helm charts registry, etc.), and promotes ...