Design: Sharing Tasks and Pipelines without Copy Pasta

[bobcatfish]

Expected Behavior

We should have a recommended path for how we expect people to make use of the Tasks and Pipelines that we make available in this repo, as well as how they can share Tasks and Pipelines within a company.

We want to be able to uphold these attributes:

• Config as code - i.e. checking in Pipelines and Tasks with the code they are used for (but what about a company with many repos that wants to share these? what about our official catalog?)
• Updates to the definitions in this repo should be consumable for users (but how do we deal with changes and compatibility issues? should we have versions?)

Actual Behavior

At the moment the best way to use the Tasks and Pipelines in this repo would be to copy them (jokingly called "copy pasta") which would effectively fork them, meaning that copies can diverge over time.

Additional Info

One idea that might be worth exploring is using image registries (#29) to store Tasks and Pipelines as versioned artifacts. See https://stevelasker.blog/2019/01/25/cloud-native-artifact-stores-evolve-from-container-registries/.

[afrittoli]

Related: tektoncd/pipeline#964, tektoncd/pipeline#964

[xihaLong]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WbqPX4wmT1XLoJTM7gKekxLIUSZkggAcosYhR3lA6YQ/ Writing up a design document to capture some concrete ideas of how to potentially alleviate copy pasta, particularly focused on command line use by a Tekton end user. Open to edit by anyone in https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/tekton-dev and open to view publicly

[vdemeester]

Updated design doc : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O8VHZ-7tNuuRjPNjPfdo8bD--WDrkcz-lbtJ3P8Wugs/edit#

[popcor255]

Maybe a tekton cli option is possible.
I starting writing a design doc. Here is a poc if anyone is interested.

I find the catalog really useful; however, I only apply the task once. I dont think having a dedicated api is a real solution. However, I think having cli implementation is low hanging fruit.

1) tkapply() { kubectl get -f $1 -o json | http https://tekton-catalog-api.netlify.app/.netlify/functions/api/get/tasks | kubectl apply -f - }

2) tkapply <file>

[bobcatfish]

Related work that is also related is around the OCI image registry, and task versioning, see tektoncd/pipeline#1839 and tektoncd/community#137 (OCI TEP)

[bobcatfish]

Config as code - i.e. checking in Pipelines and Tasks with the code they are used for (but what about a company with many repos that wants to share these? what about our official catalog?)

And on this issue, also see tektoncd/pipeline#859

[tekton-robot]

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Mark the issue as fresh with /remove-lifecycle stale.
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/lifecycle stale

Send feedback to tektoncd/plumbing.

[bobcatfish]

It seems to me like this issue will be solved by @pierretasci's work in tektoncd/pipeline#1839, which will allow referencing Tasks and Pipelines in image registries, and opens the door to referencing other locations (e.g. git repos) as well.

Seems reasonable to me to close this issue? (@vdemeester @popcor255 )

[tekton-robot]

Stale issues rot after 30d of inactivity.
Mark the issue as fresh with /remove-lifecycle rotten.
Rotten issues close after an additional 30d of inactivity.
If this issue is safe to close now please do so with /close.

/lifecycle rotten

Send feedback to tektoncd/plumbing.

[popcor255]

/close

[tekton-robot]

@popcor255: Closing this issue.

In response to this:

/close

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[popcor255]

Closing since #2395 was merged.