The GitHub connector is an essential part in the workflow pipeline. It's the part that knows about what releases are available on GH and which Pull Requests have been opened.
To do this, there is a CRD installed which allows you to specify a repository and credentials to connect to this repository. The connector will configure the appropriate webhooks with this repository to get callback information based on Release and PullRequest events.
The connector also takes care of setting up a callback server, allowing GitHub to send these events to the cluster. Once a new Release or PullRequest is detected, it will be stored accordingly to the associated GitHub Repository CRD.
GitHub webhooks are not retried in case of failure, to mitigate any synchronization
problems, the connector tries to reconciliate its known releases with GitHub's list
of releases and opened pull requests every 10 minutes. This period can be configured
with the flag --reconciliation-period.
Lastly, the connector also monitors the NetworkPolicies. These policies indicate which Microservices have associated releases. If these releases are Preview releases, the connector will create Deployment objects and link the generated URL from the NetworkPolicy.
To install the GitHub connector, there's a few steps required, these are listed below.
First, an API token will be needed if a CRD is set up. This GitHub API Token
should have the admin:repo_hook and repo permissions. Once you have a token
you can manually add it to your secrets in development in the namespace that
your app expects. The expected token key is GITHUB_AUTH_TOKEN.
This Token is only needed when installing a new GitHubRepository as it is repository bound.
To install a token, go to the GitHub Personal Access Tokens page.
On the next page, you'll see the API token, this will be in the format of
888fe32217e96eaaa0709c37a488fd4a457015eb.
With this token, you can now generate a new Kubernetes Secret:
$ kubectl create secret generic github-auth-token --from-literal=GITHUB_AUTH_TOKEN=888fe32217e96eaaa0709c37a488fd4a457015eb
This will put the secret in your cluster in a format Heighliner understands. You
can now use github-auth-token as a reference to the secret.
Note: this needs to be installed in the namespace where you install the GitHubRepository.
The connector needs a domain to start with. In your production or cloud cluster, this would be a domain you will link to your service and set up in the Ingress and Deployment. In development, we recommend you use ngrok to set up a tunnel.