Declarative support?

[carolynvs]

This is feedback based on using brigade side-by-side with azure pipelines for ~6 months for Porter.

There has been quite a bit of a steep learning curve in figuring out both how brigade's libraries, javascript, GitHub actions and events. Our brigade file has always been an exercise in copy/pasting from a working brigade.js file in someone else's project, or picking @vdice's brain. 😀

It would be helpful if there was a simplified version of brigade's agent that was optimized for helping me just run makefile targets for my CI. Really that's where I keep all of my logic, in my makefile and all I want to do is call a few different variations of targets for a branch or tag.

Right now our brigade.js file is pretty big, but the entire thing boils down to this (or some subset for a PR):

make test-unit test-integration test-cli publish publish-examples

Some of the brigade.js file has more logic than that, but really that logic should be in a makefile target, it's not only because at this point we are relying on things already being installed on an azure pipelines agent, which is cheating. 😁

But if we could distill it down or make a lot of the noise in that file go way, and be able to use a declarative language with a documented schema, that would have made me feel a lot more comfortable picking up brigade and managing it myself.

I'm not trying to change how brigade works. Just saying that if we could add a mode on top of brigade that let me work more like I'm used to that maps to normal brigade under the hood, that would be interesting to look into.

[technosophos]

Yeah, adding a mode on top of it that would cover the base cases -- especially for standard CI/CD -- would be good.

[krancour]

Probably worth noting here that I've been working on something like this-- and it's based on an open specification (which is only a draft right now).

The spec is here: https://github.com/lovethedrake/drakespec

And here's a brigade-compatible worker: https://github.com/lovethedrake/brigdrake

[arschles]

I noticed that there is a cli for that spec available as well, so if I’m not mistaken you could test out a run through this new gateway locally before you check in code. Do I have that right @krancour @carolynvs?

[krancour]

@arschles yes. https://github.com/lovethedrake/devdrake can execute pipelines locally using nothing more than the local Docker daemon under the hood-- no k8s involved even.

[krancour]

Per the 2.0 proposal, 2.0 will drastically improve support for alternative workers, but introducing new (official) ones is deferred to a subsequent 2.x release. For now, I'm dropping the 2.0 label and adding a 2.1 label.

[krancour]

Now that v2.0.0 is out, I am going to start revisiting this as time permits.

Some effort has previously gone into an open specification for declarative pipelines, but it hasn't been touched in some time and I think the spec itself is still in need of quite a bit of work.

I will at least revisit the effort to produce a Brigade 2-compatible worker that supports the existing draft of the spec and introduce that on an experimental basis.