Client and Course Setup

Difficulty: beginner

Estimated Time: 10 minutes

Learn to use https://concourse-ci.org with this linear sequence of tutorials.

These Katacoda scenarios are based on https://concoursetutorial.com/ by Stark & Wayne

We have learned the basic concept of setting up the concourse command line client, some basic commands and the environment used for this course.

Your environment is currently being packaged as a Docker container and the download will begin shortly. To run the image locally, once Docker has been installed, use the commands

cat scrapbook_so0k_concourse/01-setup_container.tar | docker load

docker run -it /so0k_concourse/01-setup:

Restart Scenario

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Step 1 of 2

Getting Started

To run Concourse we need postgres and some basic configuration, we can launch both using the docker-compose file provided and docker-compose commands further down below.

Refer to the Docker courses to learn more about Docker.

For the purpose of this scenario, we need to provide concourse with a valid external URL of this learning environment:

echo "CONCOURSE_EXTERNAL_URL=https://[[HOST_SUBDOMAIN]]-8080-[[KATACODA_HOST]].environments.katacoda.com" >> concourse.env

You may review the configuration used here:

cat concourse.env

Next, stand up both Postgres and Concourse in quickstart mode with:

docker-compose up -d

Wait for compose to pull the docker images and stand up the database as well as the concourse UI / scheduler and workers.

...
  Status: Downloaded newer image for postgres:latest
  Pulling concourse (concourse/concourse:5.0.0)...
  5.0.0: Pulling from concourse/concourse
  6cf436f81810: Pull complete
  987088a85b96: Pull complete
  b4624b3efe06: Extracting [==================================================>]     516B/516B
  d42beb8ded59: Download complete
  f51b97ce0afa: Download complete
  b2b35a4bcc62: Downloading [==========>                                        ]  115.5MB/532.4MB

After the compose process finished, it may still take a minute for the concourse dashboard to appear in the upper frame.

If the terminal is available, let's download the command line client while waiting for the UI:

curl -Lo fly.tar.gz https://github.com/concourse/concourse/releases/download/v5.0.0/fly-5.0.0-linux-amd64.tgz

Extract

tar -xzf fly.tar.gz && rm fly.tar.gz

And put under /usr/local/bin which is by default on $PATH

mv fly /usr/local/bin/

If the dashboard became available, use the following credentials to log in with a local user (as you may have guessed from reviewing the concourse.env file earlier):

User: admin
Password: admin

For more advance configuration of authentication with identity providers such as GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, LDAP or generic OIDC ... refer to the Authentication documentation which is out of scope for this course.

Next we will configure our command line client to work with our local concourse instance.

Client Config

The concourse client is designed to be explicit which server you work with and it requires that you specify the target API for every fly request. Define an alias for our tutorial environment as follows:

fly login -t tutorial -c https://[[HOST_SUBDOMAIN]]-8080-[[KATACODA_HOST]].environments.katacoda.com

This will prompt you to log in using the web console, use admin as both username and password.

Click the link displayed in the terminal to open a new window for log in.

Once logged in, an attempt is made to send the authentication token back to the fly CLI, however this fails given the constraints of the katacoda environment. Use the copy token to clipboard button and close the window to paste the token manually into the terminal.

Once completed you may verify the contents of your local fly configuration

cat ~/.flyrc

@alexsuraci: I promise you'll end up liking it more than having an implicit target state :) Makes reusing commands from shell history much less dangerous (rogue fly configure can be bad)

Review the configured targets with the targets subcommand (alias ts)

fly ts

With the client configured, we can have an overview of all the commands supported as well as their aliases, we will opt to use the aliases in this tutorial.

fly --help

For example, we may list the number of concourse workers

fly -t tutorial ws

list active containers per worker

fly -t tutorial cs

Terminal

cd <directory>	Change directory
ls	List directory
echo 'contents' > <file>	Write contents to a file
cat <file>	Output contents of file

i	In Command Mode	Change into Insert Mode, you can now insert and edit text in the file
esc	In Insert Mode	Change into Command Mode, you can now execute commands
:wq	In Command Mode	Save and Exit

Welcome!

Client and Course Setup

Congratulations!

You've completed the scenario!

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