CircleCI Blog

Coletiv is a custom software development studio from Porto that transforms ideas into high-quality applications. We help companies of all sizes design, develop, and launch digital products for iOS, Android, and the web.

From our earliest days, continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) have been requirements for every project that we have built. We needed a tool that could cover Elixir as well as the native iOS and Android platforms that we work with. After testing several tools, we settled on CircleCI as our tool of choice.

“But, we already use scripts for deployments.”

We hear that a lot. So let’s explain why you would choose an automation tool over scripts. The main arguments are packaging and versioning. DeployHub uses an application to package together components. Applications and components have versions. Because of DeployHub’s versioning capability, you can do incremental deployments, moving away from the old-style monolithic approach. If you are just updating a .jar or .war file, you can always just copy the new file over. We agree. A script can do that, but an application is more than just a binary, and a deployment is more than just a copy. With DeployHub you can include in your package as a deployment:

• Database updates
• Environment variables
• Binaries
• Microservices
• Infrastructure changes

Organizations that utilize CircleCI to power their continuous integration and delivery understand the benefits of deploying early and often: reduced risk, fewer conflicts, and faster value for customers. Pairing CI/CD with feature flags allows modern development teams and organizations to write and ship code at their own pace while still ensuring that customers and users get the best possible experience.

In my last post, I discussed how to set up an ideal, automated CI/CD process for a new orb. The goals of this process are version control, multiple levels of testing, and automated deployment. Now, let’s walk through an example. I’ll use our Azure CLI orb, published just last month, as it is small and simple enough to be fairly easily understood, yet also a bit complex, as it does integrate with Microsoft Azure, a third-party cloud provider.

Fifteen weeks out from the launch of CircleCI orbs, there are more than 405 orbs in the Orb Registry. That’s upwards of 25 new orbs per week!

Amazingly, most of these orbs have been contributed by you, our amazing user community, or else by the folks in our new Technology Partner Program. However, there are nearly 30 orbs that have been published by CircleCI, and as CircleCI’s first Community & Partner Engineer, I’ve been spending the last few months working to develop a sustainable development pipeline for these orbs–a pipeline that will allow for building, testing, and deploying with as little manual intervention as possible.

An excerpt from a product manager’s retrospective on the launch of CircleCI orbs.

In November 2018, we launched CircleCI orbs. I recently wrote about the design decisions we made while building new package manager. Here, I want to share some of the lessons we learned (or re-learned) launching a major new feature. You likely won’t be surprised that we think a lot about how to ship working software, and our retro process helps us put in words what we observe and learn along the way.

What follows is an excerpt from our internal retrospective on the orbs launch initiative, edited a bit for public consumption.

In the agile age of software development, speed is the name of the game. This is why CI/CD tools like CircleCI have played such a pivotal role in changing how we work; sending our software along through the pipes at a breakneck pace.

We are always asking questions such as: How fast can we get a new version out to our customers? How can we add these new features and stay on schedule? How can we do these things with as little wasted time and effort as possible?

Open source software components play an important role by providing us with the building blocks of our products. These free software components allow us to skip over the more monotonous work of writing basic features on our own by offering us tried-and-true code. This allows us to focus on our business logics instead of having to build our own frameworks and infrastructures from scratch. However, even as we enjoy the benefits of open source components, they are not without their challenges, especially when it comes to security vulnerabilities.

Our goal at Rookout, the rapid debugging solution, is to help developers debug quickly and effectively, even in places where it would otherwise be hard. Dynamically created staging or testing environments can have a different configuration each time they are created, which leads to unpredictable results and bugs that are impossible to reproduce. Debugging such environments is sometimes just as hard and frustrating as debugging in production. CircleCI orbs make it easy to integrate with Rookout - a solution that makes debugging in production, staging, or test environments just as easy as debugging on your local machine.

With Rookout, you can keep your CI/CD flow fresh and stable, allowing your team to keep pushing features and fixes without fear.

Less than three months ago, we launched CircleCI orbs, our package management ecosystem for CircleCI configuration. In that time we have seen over 300 orbs created in just the first 10 weeks and more than 200 organizations using orbs across over 1,000 projects in tens of thousands of builds. We are also featuring more than 20 official partner orbs through our new Technology Partner Program. We’re incredibly grateful for the huge and positive response.

In this piece, I want to take a look back and share the key design decisions that went into creating and launching CircleCI orbs. If you’re using orbs today and want to understand how to get the most from them, or if you’re thinking about designing your own package management system, this post is for you.

Happo helps you build your user interface (UI) faster and with confidence. Automated screenshots taken in different browsers and across different screen sizes let you know exactly what parts of the UI change when you push a new commit. Organizations that use CircleCI can now directly integrate Happo using the Happo CircleCI orb.

Developers and DevOps teams have been key drivers of container adoption. The practice of DevSecOps embeds security right into today’s modern workflows without adding unnecessary friction from the security side of the organization. That doesn’t mean security teams are left out. On the contrary: by integrating with the tools developers are already using, like CircleCI, standards set by security teams are continually applied as part of the build and deploy process.

In my last post, I went over the process I went through building my first orb, and explained why it’s such a great option for those wanting to make a contribution to the open source community. In this post, I’d like to sum up the most important things I learned while writing the orb, to give some guidance to those who may want to give it a try (and I really recommend you do)!

So, ready to write an awesome and popular orb for that sweet open source contribution sauce? Keep these considerations in mind:

This post was written by Chris Smith. It originally appeared on the Pulumi blog, and has been republished here with his permission. We hope you enjoy!

On November 7, 2018, CircleCI announced the launch of Orbs, which allow you to create reusable components for CircleCI workflows. Orbs enable you to simplify your CI/CD configuration by reusing existing orb jobs or commands, in much the same way that Pulumi enables you to simplify the delivery of your cloud native infrastructure by sharing and reusing existing components.

or, How as a support engineer I wrote our most-used orb to date (and how you can too)

Experience in Open Source

If you’re a new developer, I’m here to encourage you to consider writing an orb. Orbs are a great way to add some open source experience to your resume while demonstrating most of the skills software engineering roles look for.

• Open source development experience
• Experience with continuous integration and continuous deployment
• Git and Bash experience

It’s really easy to hit all of these major points with a simple orb, even one that just posts messages to a Slack channel. This is, in fact, what I did build, and what I will discuss in this blog post.

Our goal at Codecov is to provide relevant, timely data to help developers and teams understand and improve their code’s quality. We do this by providing highly integrated tools to group, merge, archive, and compare coverage reports. Using Codecov, an engineering team can create a good testing culture while seeing the impact of each new commit on overall coverage metrics.

Codecov began as a project to solve one developer’s personal frustration with being unable to quickly and easily see what code was being tested. From there, it has grown into a tool that is used by everyone from independent developers to open source projects, from small agencies to massive enterprises. No matter the project or the team size, everyone can benefit from a better understanding of their code’s quality, and we believe that code coverage is an essential part of that understanding.

As applications get more sophisticated, it becomes necessary to ensure that teams can test and deliver their code in a consistent and repeatable fashion. One of the most difficult aspects of testing a web-based application has always been the application itself; testing the user’s paths through your interface is a critical but challenging aspect of project delivery. User interface tests have traditionally been very involved to set up and maintain, often requiring a very technical and experienced skillset. Ghost Inspector solves this problem by providing simple-to-use tooling that allows anyone on your team to create and maintain your browser-based tests. QA teams can to deliver more quickly, more consistently, and test more thoroughly within your application.

CircleCI has recently released a new product called orbs which are designed to get you up and running quickly on CircleCI. You can now easily integrate your DevOps tools with trusted orbs provided by our technology partners.

In this post I’ll demonstrate and explain the AWS ECR Orb and its usage within the CircleCI configuration file, leveraging CircleCI Workflows, and pushing an image to Docker Hub and a specified AWS ECR.

私たちは今年の6月にCircleCI Japanを設立しました。CircleCI Japanの目標の一つにコミュニティーの立ち上げと育成があり、その活動の一貫としてCircleCI初の試みであるハッカソンを先週の土曜日に行いました。

ハッカソンの目的は実にシンプルで “Orbsを書きながらOrbsを学ぼう” というものです。

In June, CircleCI announced the opening of our Japanese office. One of the primary goals of this new office is to build a stronger community in Japan. In line with that effort, last Saturday, we hosted our first-ever hackathon in Tokyo.

The focus of the hackathon was very simple: learning orbs by actually writing orbs!

Our goal at Percy is to help teams deploy with the confidence that their applications look exactly like they should.

Instead of manually checking your UI across browsers and screens, our visual testing and review solution automates it for you. Integrate Percy with your tests and our custom-built rendering infrastructure generates snapshots of your UI every time you push a change.

That workflow fits seamlessly into your existing CI/CD suite, helping you eliminate the risk of visual regressions on every single commit. With Percy, you can also run visual tests in tandem with parallelized CI builds–and our CircleCI orb makes it easier than ever.

Mobile apps are different than web apps and require tooling specifically designed to meet the needs of development, security and DevOps teams. Organizations can speed mobile appdev by optimizing flow and baking in security, which can be achieved by using CircleCI and NowSecure. A long-term collaborator with CircleCI, NowSecure is pleased to be a CircleCI Technology Partner with our own orb in the registry.

Our company Cypress.io has made an open source, MIT-licensed, free end-to-end test runner that can test anything that runs in a browser. The test runner makes it easy to effectively test complex modern web applications, yet it is simple to install, easy to learn, and it just works.

Docker gives developers the ability to streamline packaging, storage, and deployment of applications at great scale. With increased use of container technologies across software development teams, securing these images can become challenging. Due to container images becoming a regular part of the development lifecycle, security checks for these artifacts need to be woven into an automated pipeline and become a standardized best practice for testing.

At CircleCI we have been a pillar of DevOps since its inception, dedicating ourselves to redefining efficiency in software delivery, and engaging with many of the world’s most effective software organizations. As we’ve watched our industry grow and evolve, we’ve remained committed to our mission of helping the world’s best software organizations improve the way they build, test, and deploy software. Today represents a big step forward in that mission, as we open our platform to partners and community contributors in a first-class way.

Today I am pleased to announce our new Technology Partner Program. With the launch of our partner program, CircleCI is no longer just the preferred DevOps tool of thousands of top engineering organizations, but is now an open platform ready for partners, teams, and developers the world over to build upon.