Prereq - CI/CD and SVC

If these terms are alien to you, this would be a good time to take a pause, grab your favourite beverage and have a read of the follow documentation

SVC
CI/CD

With that out of the way, the first thing we’ll need to get setup for the labs is a pipeline as all your code would need to run somewhere.

While we can execute our terraform code manually, as explained in the next section and mainly in lab environments or personal cloud accounts, we advice that you stick to having your code in a git repo in your live environments.

This section will introduce you to our Git repo and Azure DevOps pipelines, we know you will need to visit Git and Azure pipelines like everyday so we might as well get started with that.

Lab Git Repo

Platform Operations uses Git for it’s source control. To create a repo for your lab, follow the steps below

Navigate to the HMCTS git organisations page. If you dont already have access you can double check the Onboarding Checklist to make sure you have the right access. You can also speak to a team member to assist if needed. #platform-operations
Create a new git repo. Call this repo lab-yourname-goldenpath. You can follow this convention in other sections of this exercise as this makes it easier to when cleaning up resources after the labs.

Create new Git repo

🔔 In a production environment you will need to update your new repository’s settings to allow merging to master | main only from a branch PR and also to require at least 1 reviewer for PR’s created. You can learn more about this in the Managing your repository’s settings and features documentation.

Clone your new repo to your local machine as you will need this later.

Lab Pipeline

You will also need a devops pipeline to run your code. To create a pipeline, follow the steps below

Create a pipeline in Azure Devops. In Azure DevOps, navigate to the HMCTS Platform Operations organisation. On the Pipelines menu, click on Pipelines

HMCTS DevOps Organisation

Create new DevOps project
Specify where you code repository is, in our case this would be Git

Specify Git repository
Follow the relevant screens and prompts, select your lab repository in Git which would be an item in the repos listed after authentication is complete. You may see screens similar to the once below

Create new pipeline

Select new pipeline repo

Authorise Azure DevOps

Build your resources

To get your resources provisioned, follow the steps below

In the lab-azure-resource folder copy all the files into your repo root folder.
Your repo folder on your local machine should now look like this

  .
  ├── .gitignore
  ├── azure-pipelines.yaml
  └── components
      ├── README.md
      └── lab
          ├── main.tf
          ├── provider.tf
          └── variables.tf

📣 NOTE: You may want to modify prefix in your resource names defined in main.tf. This will make them easier to identify, especially when there are multiple people doing labs at the same time. Ensure that the total resource name lengths do not exceed Azure limits, example:

  prefix      = "xy-${formatdate("YYMMDDhhmm", timestamp())}"

Commit and push to your repo. This will trigger a devops pipeline run.

What did i just create?

A lot has happened and is a good place to walk you through what’s taken place so far

If you have a look into the pipeline yaml file you will notice the following piece of config

  resources:
    repositories:
      - repository: cnp-azuredevops-libraries
        type: github
        ref: refs/heads/master
        name: hmcts/cnp-azuredevops-libraries
        endpoint: 'hmcts'

This loads a central template resource that used in all our repos to provide base or required functionality that most pipelines need, you don’t have to configure certain functionality from scratch, you simply reuse.

Have a look at the cnp-azuredevops-libraries repo to findout what capabilities this can give you in your other projects.

You have all the terraform resource configuration that will spin up your lab resources
You dont need to manually run or define plan or apply stages why?… yes, you guessed right, because it’s already configured in the cnp-azuredevops-libraries‘s terraform step.

This is done by using the functionality as below

  - stage: deploy
    jobs:
      - job: PlanAndApply
        steps:
          - template: steps/terraform.yaml@cnp-azuredevops-libraries
            parameters:
            ...

and pass in the required parameters

Thank us later 😉, you now have a default template that you can always use as a starting point on most repo’s you will create in the real world 😎.

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This page was last reviewed on 19 December 2024. It needs to be reviewed again on 19 February 2025 by the page owner platops-build-notices .

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