MACH - Fly Faster
I got sick of typing out long commands for fly when doing development work with my concourse pipelines, so I wrote a wrapper for it called MACH.
The issue?
Fly doesn’t appear to support any environment variables, and working with concourse and the way I do my pipelines I found myself often typing out similar commands in fly, but just changing the pipeline or job names.
I thought about it and noticed that normally I just change one option each time. I started messing around with aliases, but in the end just wrote the wrapper.
I broke down what I was repeating and what I was changing with my usage of fly and found that often my pipeline file is under ci/pipeline.yml and any custom variables are in ci/vars.yml and I was always targetting the one concourse instance concourse and a pipeline pipeline. A normal fly session could be something like this:
fly -t concourse set-pipeline -p pipeline -c ci/pipeline.yml -l ci/vars.yml
fly -t concourse unpause-pipeline -p pipeline
fly -t concourse trigger-job -j pipeline/jobname
fly -t concourse watch -j pipeline/jobname
If I changed to another directory containing a similar pipeline setup, the only thing that would change would be the pipeline name typically.
How could this be faster?
# set and unpause the pipleine in one command
mach spup
# set and unpause with two commands
mach sp
mach up
# trigger and watch a job in one command
mach tjw
# trigger and watch in two commands
mach tj
mach w
Since I usually work in the directory that my pipeline lives, and majority of my pipelines are set out the same way, I created a .mach file with some basic variables in it that I place in each pipelines root directory.
FLYTARGET=concourse
PIPEFILE=ci/pipeline.yml
VARSFILE=ci/vars.yml
PIPELINE=pipeline
When executing mach, it checks in the working dir for this file, and sources the variables from it.
Any job based fly commands will collect a list of the jobs from the pipeline file and present them as user selectable, but you can specify just the job name using mach tj -j jobname and not need to use the pipeline name as it is sourced from the .mach file
user@host: ~/nginx-boshrelease$ mach tj
__ ______ ________ __
/ |/ / | / ____/ / / /
/ /|_/ / /| |/ / / /_/ /
/ / / / ___ / /___/ __ /
/_/ /_/_/ |_\____/_/ /_/
=============================
Using pipeline: nginx-boshrelease
Pipeline file: ci/pipeline.yml
Vars file: ci/vars.yml
Trigger job in nginx-boshrelease
Select which job, or exit-mach:
1) test-release
2) bump-rc
3) bump-minor
4) bump-major
5) promote-release
6) Q) exit-mach
MACH doesn’t do the full command set of fly, just the commands I found to use the most and wanted to speed them up.
See the github page for MACH to see what commands it supports.