Concourse: the continuous thing-doer

Concourse is an automation system written in Go. It is most commonly used for
CI/CD, and is built to scale to any kind of automation pipeline, from simple to
complex.

Concourse is very opinionated about a few things: idempotency, immutability,
declarative config, stateless workers, and reproducible builds.

<!--- Leaving this here for now my for my own reference ## The road to Concourse v10 [Concourse v10][v10] is the code name for a set of features which, when used in combination, will have a massive impact on Concourse's capabilities as a generic continuous thing-doer. These features, and how they interact, are described in detail in the [Core roadmap: towards v10][v10] and [Re-inventing resource types][prototypes] blog posts. (These posts are *slightly* out of date, but they get the idea across.) Notably, **v10 will make Concourse not suck for multi-branch and/or pull-request driven workflows** - examples of *spatial* change, where the set of things to automate grows and shrinks over time. Because v10 is really an alias for a ton of separate features, there's a lot to keep track of - here's an overview: | Feature | RFC | Status | | ------------------------ | ---------------- | ------ | | `set_pipeline` step | ✔ [#31][rfc-31] | ✔ v5.8.0 (experimental) | | Var sources for creds | ✔ [#39][rfc-39] | ✔ v5.8.0 (experimental), TODO: [#5813][issue-5813] | | Archiving pipelines | ✔ [#33][rfc-33] | ✔ v6.5.0 | | Instanced pipelines | ✔ [#34][rfc-34] | ✔ v7.0.0 (experimental) | | Static `across` step | 🚧 [#29][rfc-29] | ✔ v6.5.0 (experimental) | | Dynamic `across` step | 🚧 [#29][rfc-29] | ✔ v7.4.0 (experimental, not released yet) | | Projects | 🚧 [#32][rfc-32] | 🙏 RFC needs feedback! | | `load_var` step | ✔ [#27][rfc-27] | ✔ v6.0.0 (experimental) | | `get_var` step | ✔ [#27][rfc-27] | 🚧 [#5815][issue-5815] in progress! | | [Prototypes][prototypes] | ✔ [#37][rfc-37] | ⚠ Pending first use of protocol (any of the below) | | `run` step | 🚧 [#37][rfc-37] | ⚠ Pending its own RFC, but feel free to experiment | | Resource prototypes | ✔ [#38][rfc-38] | 🙏 [#5870][issue-5870] looking for volunteers! | | Var source prototypes | | 🚧 [#6275][issue-6275] planned, may lead to RFC | | Notifier prototypes | 🚧 [#28][rfc-28] | ⚠ RFC not ready | The Concourse team at VMware will be working on these features, however in the interest of growing a healthy community of contributors we would really appreciate any volunteers. This roadmap is very easy to parallelize, as it is comprised of many orthogonal features, so the faster we can power through it, the faster we can all benefit. We want these for our own pipelines too! 😆 If you'd like to get involved, hop in [Discord][discord] or leave a comment on any of the issues linked above so we can coordinate. We're more than happy to help figure things out or pick up any work that you don't feel comfortable doing (e.g. UI, unfamiliar parts, etc.). Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far, whether in code or in the community, and thanks to everyone for their patience while we figure out how to support such common functionality the "Concoursey way!" 🙏 [issue-5813]: https://github.com/concourse/concourse/issues/5813 [issue-5814]: https://github.com/concourse/concourse/issues/5814 [issue-5815]: https://github.com/concourse/concourse/issues/5815 [issue-5870]: https://github.com/concourse/concourse/issues/5870 [issue-5921]: https://github.com/concourse/concourse/issues/5921 [issue-6275]: https://github.com/concourse/concourse/issues/6275 [pr-5896]: https://github.com/concourse/concourse/pull/5896 [rfc-27]: https://github.com/concourse/rfcs/blob/master/027-var-steps/proposal.md [rfc-28]: https://github.com/concourse/rfcs/pull/28 [rfc-29]: https://github.com/concourse/rfcs/pull/29 [rfc-31]: https://github.com/concourse/rfcs/blob/master/031-set-pipeline-step/proposal.md [rfc-32]: https://github.com/concourse/rfcs/pull/32 [rfc-33]: https://github.com/concourse/rfcs/blob/master/033-archiving-pipelines/proposal.md [rfc-34]: https://github.com/concourse/rfcs/blob/master/034-instanced-pipelines/proposal.md [rfc-37]: https://github.com/concourse/rfcs/blob/master/037-prototypes/proposal.md [rfc-38]: https://github.com/concourse/rfcs/blob/master/038-resource-prototypes/proposal.md [rfc-39]: https://github.com/concourse/rfcs/blob/master/039-var-sources/proposal.md [v10]: https://blog.concourse-ci.org/2019/07/17/core-roadmap-towards-v10.html [prototypes]: https://blog.concourse-ci.org/2019/10/15/reinventing-resource-types.html --->

Installation

Concourse is distributed as a single concourse binary, available on the Releases page.

If you want to just kick the tires, jump ahead to the Quick Start.

In addition to the concourse binary, there are a few other supported formats.
Consult their GitHub repos for more information:

• Docker image
• Kubernetes Helm chart
• BOSH release

Quick Start

shCopy
$ wget https://concourse-ci.org/docker-compose.yml
$ docker-compose up -d
Creating docs_concourse-db_1 ... done
Creating docs_concourse_1    ... done

Concourse will be running at http://localhost:8080.
You can log in with the username/password as test/test.

Next, install fly by downloading it from the web UI at
http://localhost:8080/download-fly and
target your local Concourse as the test user:

shCopy
$ fly -t ci login -c http://localhost:8080 -u test -p test
logging in to team 'main'

target saved

You can follow our Getting Started Tutorial
to learn how to write Concourse pipelines.

Configuring a Pipeline

Concourse has no GUI for configuration. Instead, pipelines are defined in
declarative YAML files:

yamlCopy
resources:
- name: examples
  type: git
  source:
    uri: https://github.com/concourse/examples

jobs:
- name: hello-world
  plan:
  - get: examples
    trigger: true
  - task: hello
    file: examples/tasks/hello-world.yml

Most operations are done via the accompanying fly CLI. If you've got Concourse
installed, try saving the above example
as hello-world.yml, target your Concourse
instance, and then run:

shCopy
fly -t ci set-pipeline -p hello-world -c hello-world.yml

These pipeline files are self-contained, making them easily portable between
Concourse instances.

Learn More

• The Official Site for documentation,
  reference material, and example pipelines.
• The Getting Started Tutorial
  to learn the basics of Concourse
• See Concourse in action with our own pipelines
• Hang around in the GitHub discussions or in
  Discord
• See what we're working on the project board.

Contributing

Our user base is basically everyone that develops software (and wants it to
work).

It's a lot of work, and we need your help! If you're interested, check out our
contributing docs.