Use CI Pipelines with Tanzu Platform

Continuous Integration Pipeline tools are the preferred mechanism for imperatively deploying applications to Tanzu Platform for Kubernetes. Most enterprises have already adopted CI Pipelines for use with application teams, and it is easy to integrate a Tanzu application deployment with your other existing CI tasks in a pipeline.

CI Pipelines execute in a controlled environment, which makes them much easier to support than desktop environments where configuration can vary greatly.

Before you begin

• Generate an API token for use with your CI Pipeline. See the steps for generating an appropriately scoped token.

• Obtain credentials for the container registry that Tanzu Platform is using for your application images. The CI Pipeline needs credentials with push and pull privileges.

Important

The example pipelines provided in this topic are community-supported. They are intended to be used as examples of how you can use Tanzu Platform for Kubernetes within your existing CI pipelines. As examples, they are not supported by VMware.

Configure your Pipeline

Use these reference examples of pipelines from CI providers to set up your CI pipeline:

• GitHub Actions: A GitHub Action for deploying apps to Tanzu Platform is in the tanzu-deploy-action GitHub repository. Follow the instructions in the README file for creating a GitHub Workflow that uses the Action.

• Azure DevOps: An Azure DevOps Pipeline for deploying apps to Tanzu Platform is in the tanzu-deploy-ado-pipeline GitHub repository. Follow the instructions in the README file for creating the ADO Pipeline for your application.

• GitLab: An example pipeline for deploying apps to the Tanzu Platform with GitLab CI/CD is in the tanzu-deploy-ci-cd. Follow the instructions in the README file to get started.

• Jenkins: An example Jenkins pipeline for deploying apps to the Tanzu Platform is in the tanzu-build/jenkins GitHub repository. Follow the instructions to get started.