[{"id":"cG9zdDo1MzQ=","slug":"automate-github-releases-with-drone","title":"Automate Github releases with Drone.","content":"\n

If you have a project on github that has releases for code or binaries for example it might be a good idea to automate it. Not only this saved a lot of clicks and time, but also it makes releases predictable and therefore less prone to errors in the process.

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For this article I will take my own project as the example here, but of course this can be applied to any project, written in whatever language and/or framework.

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Also I will base this guide on Drone. But I’m sure there is the same workflow for jenkins/circle/whatever CI/CD system you are using.
This means I’m assuming you have a repository already running with Drone.

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The first thing we will need is an access token for the Github API.
You can get them here https://github.com/settings/tokens. I called my Drone and you need to check the permissions for the repos as follows.

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\"\" — How to create a new token in Github

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Copy the token and save it somewhere safe. You will see it only once.

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We will add this token to our Drone repository settings. For that navigate to your drone instance and open the settings for the repository in question.

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I’ve called my secret github and I have not allowed it in PRs. Otherwise a PR made by some random user could trigger a release. We don’t want that.

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Now it’s time to edit our drone file and make everything automatic. The flow at the end will be as follows.

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Code, commit and develop
When you are ready for the next release we create a tag
Once a tag is created and pushed drone will automatically build and release that code attached to the tag.

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Simple right? Lets see how!

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# .drone.yml\n---\nkind: pipeline\nname: default\n\nsteps:\n- name: build\n  image: node\n  pull: always\n  commands:\n    - yarn\n    - yarn run bin\n  when:\n    event: tag\n\n- name: publish\n  image: plugins/github-release\n  pull: always\n  settings:\n    api_key:\n      from_secret: github\n    files: bin/*\n    checksum:\n      - sha512\n    note: CHANGELOG.md\n  when:\n    event: tag\n---\nkind: signature\nhmac: 3b1f235f6a6f0ee1aa3f572d0833c4f0eec931dbe0378f31b9efa336a7462912\n\n...

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Lets understand what is happening here:

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First I’m building my project. In this case this is a standalone typescript executable build by pkg. The build binaries will be emitted into the ./bin folder. But it really does not matter. Could be anything.

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Secondly we tell the Github release plugin what files we want to include in the release. In my case this was everything inside the bin folder. This can also be an array.

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files:\n  - dist/*\n  - bin/binary.exe

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The api_key includes the token, which we load from a secret so that we don’t simply put in the .drone.yml file, which could be a huge security issue!

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The checksum setting is also amazing because as the name suggests the plugin automatically generates checksums for all the files. That is amazingly practical and there is no reason not to do that. You can choose a few hash functions but I would suggest simply going with sha512.

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So how do a trigger a release now?

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Simple! First tag your code with the following command

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git tag 1.2.3

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Now push the tag and drone will be on its way

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git push --tags

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Thats it! Hope it made your release journey easier 🙂

\n","status":"publish","date":"2020-01-29T15:17:12","modified":"2021-12-24T23:45:59","tags":{"nodes":[{"id":"dGVybTo4","slug":"cd","name":"cd","count":2},{"id":"dGVybToxOQ==","slug":"drone","name":"drone","count":2}]},"post":{"featured":{"srcSet":"https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/franck-v-U3sOwViXhkY-unsplash-scaled-1-300x225.jpg 300w, https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/franck-v-U3sOwViXhkY-unsplash-scaled-1-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/franck-v-U3sOwViXhkY-unsplash-scaled-1-150x113.jpg 150w, https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/franck-v-U3sOwViXhkY-unsplash-scaled-1-768x576.jpg 768w, https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/franck-v-U3sOwViXhkY-unsplash-scaled-1-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/franck-v-U3sOwViXhkY-unsplash-scaled-1-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/franck-v-U3sOwViXhkY-unsplash-scaled-1-500x375.jpg 500w, https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/franck-v-U3sOwViXhkY-unsplash-scaled-1-800x600.jpg 800w, https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/franck-v-U3sOwViXhkY-unsplash-scaled-1-1200x900.jpg 1200w, https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/franck-v-U3sOwViXhkY-unsplash-scaled-1-1500x1125.jpg 1500w, https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/franck-v-U3sOwViXhkY-unsplash-scaled-1-2000x1500.jpg 2000w","altText":"","sourceUrl":"https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/franck-v-U3sOwViXhkY-unsplash-scaled-1.jpg"}}},{"id":"cG9zdDo5Ng==","slug":"write-your-own-drone-plugin-from-scratch","title":"Write your own drone plugin from scratch","content":"\n

Recently Drone released it 1.0 version update. It came with a cleaner and more useful UI and a new structure for declaring the YAML drone pipelines files. Perfect time for writing our own drone plugin. 🎉

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TL;DR Get the code: https://github.com/CupCakeArmy/drone-deploy

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This should be a starting point to guide you in the right direction towards writing your first drone plugin. It’s easier than it might seems. Let’s go 🚀

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What do we want to achieve?

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Login with an ssh key from drone secrets
copy files to a remote location
execute remote commands

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How are Drone Plugins written?

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Very simple actually: drone plugins are nothing more than a docker image. The process is as follows:

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The code gets mounted inside your image at `/drone/src`
You make slack api calls, deploy, whatever you want.

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Since the source is mounted inside a container you can use whatever language you prefer! Cool. For this small project I decided to go with Python, but you could use node, go, whatever runs inside Docker.

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First lets look how a plugin is defined inside the .drone.yml file.

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kind: pipeline\nname: default\n\nsteps:\n\n  # build...\n\n  - name: deploy\n    image: you/your-drone-plugin # public docker image\n    settings:\n      host: example.org\n      user: root\n      password: h4x0rz

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How do we get those variables? Drone mounts them as environment variables inside the plugin container prefixed by PLUGIN_.
So host: example.org becomes $PLUGIN_HOST=example.org and so forth.

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In Python

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def main():\n    host = os.environ.get('PLUGIN_HOST')\n    port = os.environ.get('PLUGIN_PORT', 22)\n    user = os.environ.get('PLUGIN_USER')\n    password = os.environ.get('PLUGIN_PASSWORD')\n    key = os.environ.get('PLUGIN_KEY')\n\nmain()\n# example.org\n# 22\n# root\n# h4x0rz\n# None

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How do I get secrets? We need to use the from_secret syntax. Supposing you have saved your private key as a repository secret under ssh_key the example would look as follows:

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- name: deploy\n  settings:\n    key:\n      from_secret: ssh_key

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Easy 👌What about arrays? We want to copy a list of sources to the server.

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- name: deploy\n  settings:\n    sources:\n      - ./public\n      - docker-compose.yml

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This will result into PLUGIN_SOURCES=./public,docker-compose.yml. Basically we get a comma-separated-string.

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# Takes a string, splits it at the comma and removes empty elements\ndef clean_array(s: str) -> List[str]:\n    return list(filter(None, s.split(',')))\n\nsources = clean_array(os.environ.get('PLUGIN_SOURCES', ''))

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Putting it all together

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import paramiko\n\ndef execute(c: SSHClient, cmd: str, path: str = None, env:dict = None) -> str:\n    if path is not None:\n        cmd = 'cd {}; {}'.format(path, cmd)\n    stdin, stdout, stderr = c.exec_command(cmd, environment=env)\n    return stdout.read().decode('utf-8').strip()\n\n\ndef main():\n\n\t# Takes a string, splits it at the comma and removes empty elements\n    def clean_array(s: str) -> List[str]:\n        return list(filter(None, s.split(',')))\n\t\n    host = os.environ.get('PLUGIN_HOST')\n    port = os.environ.get('PLUGIN_PORT', 22)\n    user = os.environ.get('PLUGIN_USER')\n    password = os.environ.get('PLUGIN_PASSWORD')\n    key = os.environ.get('PLUGIN_KEY')\n    target = os.environ.get('PLUGIN_TARGET')\n    commands = clean_array(os.environ.get('PLUGIN_COMMANDS', ''))\n    sources = clean_array(os.environ.get('PLUGIN_SOURCES', ''))\n\n    ssh = paramiko.SSHClient()\n    try:\n        k = paramiko.RSAKey.from_private_key(io.StringIO(key))\n        ssh.set_missing_host_key_policy(paramiko.AutoAddPolicy())\n        ssh.connect(hostname=host, username=user, pkey=k, port=port, password=password)\n\n        sftp = ssh.open_sftp()\n        try:\n\t\t\t# Upload the files\n\t\t\t# for file in file....\n\t\t\tsftp.put(archive_local, archive_remote)\n        finally:\n            sftp.close()\n\n        for command in commands:\n            output = execute(ssh, command, target, envs)\n            print(command)\n            print(output)\n\n    finally:\n        ssh.close()

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This of course simplifies the code a lot, but should give a general idea how it’s done.

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For a full fledged example check out the repo: https://github.com/CupCakeArmy/drone-deploy

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Enjoy! 👋

\n","status":"publish","date":"2019-05-25T17:07:02","modified":"2020-09-22T20:46:45","tags":{"nodes":[{"id":"dGVybTo4","slug":"cd","name":"cd","count":2},{"id":"dGVybToxOQ==","slug":"drone","name":"drone","count":2},{"id":"dGVybToyNQ==","slug":"guide","name":"guide","count":1},{"id":"dGVybTo0Mw==","slug":"plugin","name":"plugin","count":1},{"id":"dGVybTo0Ng==","slug":"python","name":"python","count":3}]},"post":{"featured":{"srcSet":"https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/asoggetti-418839-unsplash-300x200.jpg 300w, https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/asoggetti-418839-unsplash-1024x684.jpg 1024w, https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/asoggetti-418839-unsplash-150x100.jpg 150w, https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/asoggetti-418839-unsplash-768x513.jpg 768w, https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/asoggetti-418839-unsplash-1536x1025.jpg 1536w, https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/asoggetti-418839-unsplash-2048x1367.jpg 2048w, https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/asoggetti-418839-unsplash-500x334.jpg 500w, https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/asoggetti-418839-unsplash-800x534.jpg 800w, https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/asoggetti-418839-unsplash-1200x801.jpg 1200w, https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/asoggetti-418839-unsplash-1500x1001.jpg 1500w, https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/asoggetti-418839-unsplash-2000x1335.jpg 2000w","altText":"","sourceUrl":"https://api.nicco.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/asoggetti-418839-unsplash-scaled.jpg"}}}]