Portal

DevOps tools

About DevOps tools

One of the powerful features of the user portal is an ability to quickly stand up development environments from scratch. Commonly, deploying such environments would require someone experienced with DevOps tools and CI/CD pipelines - and individual developers or developer teams may not have such experience.

On the user portal, a full environment can be built directly from the portal, with no DevOps experience required. The environment requires the following components:

  • Docker registry - used as a repository for Docker images.
  • Kubernetes deployment - orchestration platform to run applications based on Docker containers.
  • SonarQube - an open-source platform for continuous inspection of code quality to perform automatic reviews with static analysis of code to detect bugs, code smells, and security vulnerabilities.
  • GitLab project for a Git-repository, issue-tracking and CI/CD pipeline.

All of these components can be built directly on user portal using provided services and marketplace appliances. As a final step, the “DevOps” page in the portal allows to create a project in GitLab that integrates all these components together, allowing you to manage resources in the project.

DevOps page

The DevOps page in the portal allows you to build a new project in Gitlab. The project is configured to:

  • Use Docker registry to store Docker containers built
  • Use SonarQube to run code quality checks
  • Use Kubernetes to host your applications

Creating a new project via DevOps page

To create a new project, you will need to have access to the required services - Docker Registry, Kubernetes, SonarKube, Gitlab account. You can install these services as marketplace applications and managed Kubernetes cluster, or bring your own services

Note: Controlling Gitlab project via API requires the REST API connection to be encrypted by SSL (HTTPS protocol). Initially, the Gitlab installation will be configured to use unencrypted HTTP - to change that, you'll need to acquire and install proper SSL certificate. As an alternative to marketplace, you may use an existing Gitlab installation with SSL preconfigured (for example, create a free account on gitlab.com)

Go to Portal, click on the Devops tab in the navigation. On the page, enter the following parameters:

  • URL to Docker registry (if you use a Docker Registry marketplace appliance, you may copy the URL from the “App outputs” page of your Docker registry app in the marketplace)
  • Kubeconfig - copy the body of your kubeconfig file, and paste the entire file content into this field
  • URL to SonarQube (again, if you use a SonarKube marketplace appliance, the “App outputs” page of your SonarQube app contains that URL.)
  • URL of Gitlab (make sure there is https prefix), and the name of the new project to be created in Gitlab (don't use any existing project name). If you use public Gitlab service, enter https://gitlab.com.
  • Your Gitlab private token (the one you generated in Gitlab application). See section generating gitlab token for more details.

Verify the data, and click the “Create Project” button at the bottom.

After few seconds, you see a message acknowledging a successful project creation.

Generating Gitlab API token

When generating a Gitlab token, make sure you select all scope options. For detailed instructions, consult Personal access tokens Gitlab documentation