New IBM i deployment tool

[andreas-prouza]

You may have noticed my build tool (OBI).
Now, I am working on a deployment tool as an additional modle to OBI.

This tool will be presented in 2 parts:

• Backend
  The core application for the execution of all steps in the deployment .
  All functions can be accessed via WebAPIs.
  So you can integrate it anywhere in your DevOps chain.
• Web frontend
  The GUI part.
  Since the GUI is using the WebAPIs from backend, there exist no dependency and the GUI can be exchanged by another one.

Backend

Following features contains the backend ...

WebAPIs

To access and execute steps of each deployment

Workflow based deployment

This definition is stored as JSON in etc/workflow.json.

Various workflows with different steps can be defined.
Means, for each deployment, you can choose which workflow should be used.
Here are 2 examples:

• Default deployment
  
• Hotfix
  

For each workflow you can define:

• ... the stages to run
• ... the steps which will be executed in a stage
• ... the stages which should run after the it finished a stage
  You can define multiple stages to parallelise tasks. (See Default deployment)
• ... individual steps to get executed
  Your own scripts or commands

Processing steps

As mentioned above, multiple processing steps can be defined for each stage.

There are already predefined steps (save objects, transfer to another system, backup, restore objects, ...).
In addition further steps can be defined. The following types are supported:

• PASE
  This will be executed as shell command, e.g: echo 'test success'
• QSYS
  IBM i Commands, e.g: CALL MYPGM PARM('TEST')
• SCRIPT
  A Python script located in scripts/

Web frontend

Overview of deployments:

Detailed deployment information

The workflow including it's stages will be printed in a graphical way:

Detailed informations for each step can be displayed:

Each object will be listed and tracked.

For WebAPI usage

An authentication token is necessary:

Integration in your IDE

In vscode (or RDi) you just add a further button to runs the deployment script, which already exist in IBM i Build with OBI

Authority requirements

Both, the deployment tool and OBI do not require any special permissions.
Everything (including the web server) can run under an user profile with user class *USER without any other special permissions.

Only if you need to build the objects with specific authority object authority, you may need more.

[andreas-prouza]

It's now available: https://github.com/andreas-prouza/i-releaser