Orb development kit
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Overview
Orbs are reusable snippets of code that help automate repeated processes, accelerate project setup, and make it easy to integrate with third-party tools. CircleCI maintains an orb registry with certified, partner, and third-party orbs.
The orb development kit refers to a suite of tools that work together to simplify the orb development process when authoring your own orb. The kit provides automatic testing and deployment on CircleCI.
The orb init command is the key to using the orb development kit. This command initiates a new orb project based on a template, and that template uses the other tools in the kit to automatically test and deploy your orb.
Orb development kit components
The orb development kit is made up of the following components:
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Orb template: Repository with CircleCI’s orb project template, which is automatically ingested and modified by the
orb initcommand. -
CircleCI CLI: Contains two commands which are designed to work with the kit. The
orb initcommand initializes a new orb project, and theorb packcommand packs the orb source into a singleorb.ymlfile.-
Orb init command: Initializes a new orb project.
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Orb pack command: Packs an orb with local scripts.
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Orb tools orb: An orb for creating orbs, which is automatically implemented as a part of the generated configuration when using the orb init command.
For more information on orb packing, see the Orbs concepts page.