How to trigger a waypoint build from github commit?

Waypoint
1

I want to use waypoint for my hobby projects. I don’t have a CI pipeline. I also dont want to have to manually check out my project just to build it and throw it away. Can waypoint pull source from github directly and read the waypoint.hcl ?

2

Welcome @thedewpoint!

In 0.1.x, the Waypoint CLI operates on locally accessible files. The waypoint init command has a -from-project option that enables retrieving remote content for the CLI to operate. The command makes it possible to use remote git as your system of record with a workflow like the following:

  1. Retrieve remote app files with waypoint init -from-project
  2. Navigate into the project directory and invoke waypoint init
  3. Perform whatever waypoint work you would like with waypoint up, waypoint logs, waypoint exec etc.
  4. Delete all local files.
  5. Time goes by.
  6. Retrieve remote app files with waypoint init -from-project
  7. Navigate into the project directory and invoke waypoint init. The project name and app name from waypoint.hcl file already exist, so any waypoint commands issues modify that existing project and app.
  8. Perform whatever waypoint work you would like with waypoint up, waypoint logs, waypoint exec etc.

For a full example see this gist using waypoint-examples/docker/static.

With 0.1, a simplified workflow would have to combine the steps above into a script or similar.

Can you describe your ideal workflow if this doesn’t work for you?

3

Thanks for the reply @jbayer! This is part of what I was looking for. The other part was triggering waypoint up upon a git commit. My thought was to tell waypoint where my project lived and when I committed a new file it would automatically rebuild and publish my image and then deploy to my kubernetes cluster if that makes sense. This is still very helpful though! Thank you

4

Ok, I was thrown off somewhat by your comment that you don’t have a CI pipeline. If you’re using Github already, then following this Waypoint in Github Actions documentation shows you how to have git commits that are pushed to Github trigger Waypoint activity. The example shows a couple of different flows. E.g. you can have the default git branch using a particular Waypoint workspace (say development) and then when you push commits to a release branch you can use a different Waypoint workspace (say representing production).

This approach moves the Waypoint CLI execution from your workstation to Github Actions. It requires a network reachable Waypoint Server and deployment target (ECS, k8s, etc) . The waypoint CLI that runs in the Github Actions environment will attempt to reach out to both the Waypoint server and the deployment target.