First Steps with Concourse¶

In this lab you will familiarize yourself with Concourse by:

logging in to the Concourse dashboard
logging in to Concourse via the fly cli
setting your first Concourse pipeline and running it

The Concourse Dashboard¶

In a browser, visit Concourse. The url follows the pattern ci.environment-name.pal4pe.com .

Locate local user credentials¶

We will discuss Credhub in detail in an upcoming lab.

For now, follow these instructions:

Navigate to ~/workspace/concourse-bosh-deployment
Execute credhub find --name-like=local

This command outputs the complete name (think key) of the credentials we are after. 1. Execute credhub get --name=/p-bosh/concourse/local_user

Use these credentials to log in to the dashboard.

Notice the welcome message, and the fact that the team called main has no pipelines set at this time.

Log in via CLI¶

You installed fly a few labs ago.

Verify that fly is indeed available in your path:
```
fly --version
```

For targeting a running Concourse server, fly has the concept of targets.

Invoke the command:
```
fly targets
```
No targets exist at this time. Notice how a target has a name, url, and a team.
A target is created by logging in for the first time.

Invoke the command:
```
fly login --help
```

Can you figure out how to invoke the fly login command to create a target called main?

Hints:

Use the flags --target --concourse-url --username --team-name
Do not supply a password
The general format is to place the target flag after fly but before the subcommand login; the subcommand-specific flags go last.

If all goes well, the cli will direct you to open a link in the browser, copy a token to your clipboard, and paste it back into the prompt in the shell.

Re-run fly targets and verify that you now have a target called main

Unlike the cf cli, every fly command requires a target. i.e. always start a fly command with fly -t target-name.

Familiarize yourself with `fly`¶

Run the fly --help command and make note of specific sub-commands that are available.

Here are some of the commands you will use in this and upcoming labs:

targets, login, login, status
teams, set-team, get-team
pipelines, set-pipeline, get-pipeline
trigger-job, hijack
pause-pipeline, unpause-pipeline

Run the command-specific help on some of these commands, and exercise some of them.

A simple pipeline¶

In a browser head over to the concourse web site
Click on the examples tab
Select the Hello world pipeline

In ~/workspace, create a new directory named pipelines and navigate to it.

Grab a copy of the pipeline configuration and save it to a file named hello.yml.

Can you figure out how to set the pipeline, unpause it, and trigger it with fly?

I recommend you invoke the trigger-job command together with the --watch flag.

Keep your Concourse web dashboard open and pay attention to how the dashboard changes from its initial state (empty):

after you set the pipeline
after you unpause the pipeline
after you trigger the job

Did the job pass? Can you see the output it generated?