README

This is the README for the codebuild-project-maker project.

Background

The purpose of this project is to provide a script (cbp) that creates a CodeBuild project that only contains a buildspec. It was born of a desire for a relatively simple way to build a version of the perl interpreter from source. So, after creating this buildspec.yml...

version: 0.2
phases:
  install:
    commands:
      - yum install -y gcc patch wget aws-cli tar gzip make zip
  pre_build:
    commands:
      - wget http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/perl-$PERL_VERSION.tar.gz -O perl-$PERL_VERSION.tar.gz
  build:
    commands:
      - tar xfvz perl-$PERL_VERSION.tar.gz
      - cd perl-$PERL_VERSION && ./Configure -des -Dprefix=/opt/perl-$PERL_VERSION -Dman1dir=none -Dman3dir=none
      - make && make install DESTDIR=/tmp
artifacts:
  base-directory: '/tmp'
  files:
    - '**/*'
  name: perl-$PERL_VERSION.zip

...and seeing it, much to my surprise, actually work, it made sense to codify the research I did in a bash script.

Use Case

The purpose of the project is to provide a way to create CodeBuild projects that build artifacts from a buildspec.yml file and make them available in an S3 bucket. There are times when you have no source code or the source code is not in a repository that is directly supported by CodeBuild. CodeBuild supports the following source repositories:

• CodeCommit
• GitHub
• GitHub Enterprise
• S3
• Bitbucket

Fortunately, there is also a "NO_SOURCE" option that allows you to simply apply a build a recipe that creates artifacts. In fact, CodeBuild could be used as a way to execute some bits of code triggered by CloudWatch events including scheduled events (think batch jobs). This script however focuses on simply running a recipe - how you trigger it is up to you.

The script does not try to provide options for everything you can do with CodeBuild, but just enough to initiate a generic build that creates some artifacts.

Additonal Notes

By default, the container used to execute the recipe is the amazonlinux Docker image that mimics (for the most part) the image used by Lambdas. You can override that by providing an option (-c) when you create the project.

By default, the project will configure the CodeBuild project to write your artifacts to the S3 bucket you specify with the bucket prefix as the project name. You can override the bucket and bucket prefix with the -b and -k options. See below for a description of the options.

cpb Options

• -c

  The default Docker image used for the build is the amazonlinux image which mimics the same environment used by Lambda. You can overrride that with this option.

• -d

  Provide a description for your project. If no description is provided, then the description will become the project name.

• -D

  Use this option (dryrun) to just echo the commands that will be executed.

• -p

  Project name.

• -P

  If your project needs to run in privileged mode provide this option.

• -b

  Name of the S3 bucket that will contain the artifacts of the build.

• -k

  Prefix name for storing your artifacts. If not provided, the project name will be used as the bucket prefix.

• -B

  By default the buildspec file name is buildspec.yml however you can override that with this option.

• -t

  Compute type (small, medium, large). Default is small.

Creating a CodeBuild Project

In addition to creating a buildspec.yml file, to create a CodeBuild project you need to follow these steps:

1. create an IAM service role for CodeBuild to assume
2. attach a policy that allows the role to write to CloudWatch logs and an S3 bucket
3. create a CodeBuild project

Obviously, in order to create roles and policies you'll need the ability to make IAM API calls.

You should be prepared to provide:

• an S3 bucket name that you have provisioned
• a buildspec.yml file
• a project name

Assuming you have your buildspec.yml file ready to roll...to create the project, follow this recipe.

1. cbp -p project-name create-role
2. cpb -p -b my-bucket-name create-policy
3. cpb -p -b my-bucket-name create-project

To start a build:

cbp -p project-name start-build name val ...

Where name is the name of an environment variable and val is the value of the variable. You can provide as many environment variable as necessary.

Notes

• Originally, the script created the role, policy and CodeBuild project all at the same time, however IAM policies sometimes take a bit of time to propagate and the project creation step would fail.

See this link.

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=255063

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2019 Robert C. Lauer. All rights reserved.

This is free software and may be used without charge for any purpose.