Integrate with GitHub Deployments

[billyshambrook]

Hey, am playing with the idea of how to use GitHub Deployment API to drive deployments in a gitops way. GitHub Deployments API is nice because it provides a UI within GitHub which shows what commits are currently deployed within each environment. This is also useful for doing pull request deployments you can add a URL to the deployment where the deployment can be accessed from which also shows up in the pull request UI.

Was wondering if it makes sense to allow referencing a deployment environment in the GitRepository API. The controller could then fetch the commit sha from the latest deployment that matches that environment, something like:

apiVersion: source.fluxcd.io/v1alpha1
kind: GitRepository
metadata:
  name: podinfo
  namespace: default
spec:
  interval: 1m
  url: https://github.com/stefanprodan/podinfo
  ref:
    deployment: production

You could then trigger the controller by creating a new deployment like so:

curl -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer ${GITHUB_TOKEN} --data '{"ref": "master", "environment": "production"}' https://api.github.com/stefanprodan/podinfo/deployments

The new deployment would include the latest sha from the master branch which can be used to grab the latest source.

This however does require the "cluster controller" (e.g. kustomize-controller) to update the deployment status once it has been applied - not sure where this would fit in with regards to the gitops toolkit.

Another problem I can see is that this is GitHub specific but GitRepository looks like it should work with any Git provider, not sure if other Git providers have a similar concept which could be used or whether this should be a different kind e.g. GitHubRepository or GitHubDeployment

[squaremo]

@billyshambrook Can I turn this into a Discussion? (I'd need to transfer it to flux2 repo first)

[kingdonb]

I would like to know more about GitHub Deployments API and how it could be used with Flux, but I haven't found a really good page that explains how it works. Do you have one of these in public that we can refer to, so we can understand better what it is we're talking about? (Is it a tool for creating preview environments?)

[GregoireW]

Deployment api can be used to automate deployment with github action (react to deployment event like created, process, failure success)
Or you can simply use it to track your deployment performed by something else ( the CD part update the deployment object in github)

Looking for a public example, I found this repo https://github.com/chrispat/rails-blog which expose 3 environments.
If you check on an environment, you will see deployment history with success/failure.

If the alert system is able to give deployment status (what is a successful deployment ? a deployment with object created like today ? or should it be a "status controller" to get the readiness status of a deployment ) then a "github deployment" notification provider could be something to think about.

I saw some discussion about a 'preview' controller.
If so, it could be triggered by PR event but you won't be able to filter what you want to deploy or not (like kind of PR ... ) or you need to use tag on PR which add complexity.
You can listen to github deployment event, it would mean you can control what you want to deploy. but it is more like a ci-ops approach
Or you may simply scan repository and create a policy to trigger new deployment per scanning tag ( it would mean to get 2 options from the tag : feature(pr) and version )

[kingdonb]

Thanks for the example just placing a link back to #2237 for visibility, where this discussion splintered, (as I have linked to here from there, but the GitHub Discussions API doesn't do the ping-back back-linking thing like the Issues discussion threads do.)