This document will walk you through deploying your own Prow instance to a new Kubernetes cluster. If you encounter difficulties, please open an issue so that we can make this process easier.
Prow runs in any kubernetes cluster. Our tackle
utility helps deploy it correctly, or you can perform each of the steps manually.
Both of these are focused on Kubernetes Engine but should work on any kubernetes distro with no/minimal changes.
First, you need to create a GitHub app. GitHub itself documents this. Initially, it is sufficient to set a dummy url for the Webhook. The exact set of permissions needed varies based on what functionality you use. Below is a minimum set of permissions needed. Please keep in mind that any changes to the permissions your app requests (both added and removed) require everyone to re-install it.
Repository permissions:
- Actions: Read-Only (Only needed when using the merge automation
tide
) - Administration: Read-Only (Required to fetch teams and collaborateurs)
- Checks: Read-Only (Only needed when using the merge automation
tide
) - Contents: Read (Read & write needed when using the merge automation
tide
) - Issues: Read & write
- Metadata: Read-Only
- Pull Requests: Read & write
- Projects: Admin when using the
projects
plugin, none otherwise - Commit statuses: Read & write
Organization permissions:
- Members: Read-Only (Read & write when using
peribolos
) - Projects: Admin when using the
projects
plugin, none otherwise
In Subscribe to events
select all events.
After you saved the app, click "Generate Private Key" on the bottom
and save the private key together with the App ID
in the top of the
page.
Prow's tackle
utility walks you through deploying a new instance of prow
in a couple of minutes, try it out!
Tackle at this point in time needs to be built from source. The following steps will walk you through the process:
- Clone the
test-infra
repository:
$ git clone [email protected]:kubernetes/test-infra.git
- Build
tackle
(This requires a working go installation on your system)
$ cd test-infra/prow/cmd/tackle && go build -o tackle
- Optionally move
tackle
to your$PATH
$ sudo mv tackle /usr/sbin/tackle
Note: Creating a cluster using the tackle
utility assumes you
have the gcloud
application in your $PATH
and are logged in. If you are
doing this on another cloud skip to the Manual deployment below.
Installing Prow using tackle
will help you through the following steps:
- Choosing a kubectl context (or creating a cluster on GCP / getting its credentials if necessary)
- Deploying prow into that cluster
- Configuring GitHub to send prow webhooks for your repos. This is where you'll provide the absolute
/path/to/github/token
To install prow run the following and follow the on-screen instructions:
- Run
tackle
:
tackle
- Once your cluster is created, you'll get a prompt to apply a
starter.yaml
. Before you do that open another terminal and apply the prow CRDs using:
kubectl apply --server-side=true -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/test-infra/master/config/prow/cluster/prowjob-crd/prowjob_customresourcedefinition.yaml
-
After that specify the
starter.yaml
you want to use (please make sure to replace the values mentioned here). Once that is done some pods still won't be in theRunning
state because we haven't created the secret containing the credentials needed for our GCS bucket. To do that follow the steps in Configure a GCS bucket. -
Once that is done,
tackle
should show you the URL where you can access the prow dashboard. To use it with your repositories head over to the settings of the GitHub app you created and there under webhook secret, supply the HMAC token you specified in thestarter.yaml
. -
Once that is done, install the GitHub app on the repositories you want (this is only needed if you ran
tackle
with the--skip-github
flag) and you should now be able to use Prow :)
See the Next Steps section after running this utility.
If you do not want to use the tackle
utility above, here are the manual set of commands tackle will run.
Prow runs in a kubernetes cluster, so first figure out which cluster you want to deploy prow into. If you already have a cluster created you can skip to the Create cluster role bindings step.
You can use the GCP cloud console to set up a project and create a new Kubernetes Engine cluster.
I'm assuming that PROJECT
and ZONE
environment variables are set, if you are using
GCP. Skip this step if you are using another service to host your Kubernetes cluster.
$ export PROJECT=your-project
$ export ZONE=us-west1-a
Run the following to create the cluster. This will also set up kubectl
to
point to the new cluster on GCP.
$ gcloud container --project "${PROJECT}" clusters create prow \
--zone "${ZONE}" --machine-type n1-standard-4 --num-nodes 2
As of 1.8 Kubernetes uses Role-Based Access Control (“RBAC”) to drive authorization decisions, allowing cluster-admin
to dynamically configure policies.
To create cluster resources you need to grant a user cluster-admin
role in all namespaces for the cluster.
For Prow on GCP, you can use the following command.
$ kubectl create clusterrolebinding cluster-admin-binding \
--clusterrole cluster-admin --user $(gcloud config get-value account)
For Prow on other platforms, the following command will likely work.
$ kubectl create clusterrolebinding cluster-admin-binding-"${USER}" \
--clusterrole=cluster-admin --user="${USER}"
On some platforms the USER
variable may not map correctly to the user
in-cluster. If you see an error of the following form, this is likely the case.
Error from server (Forbidden): error when creating
"config/prow/cluster/starter/starter-gcs.yaml": roles.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "<account>" is
forbidden: attempt to grant extra privileges:
[PolicyRule{Resources:["pods/log"], APIGroups:[""], Verbs:["get"]}
PolicyRule{Resources:["prowjobs"], APIGroups:["prow.k8s.io"], Verbs:["get"]}
APIGroups:["prow.k8s.io"], Verbs:["list"]}] user=&{<CLUSTER_USER>
[system:authenticated] map[]}...
Run the previous command substituting USER
with CLUSTER_USER
from the error
message above to solve this issue.
$ kubectl create clusterrolebinding cluster-admin-binding-"<CLUSTER_USER>" \
--clusterrole=cluster-admin --user="<CLUSTER_USER>"
There are relevant docs on Kubernetes Authentication that may help if neither of the above work.
You will need two secrets to talk to GitHub. The hmac-token
is the token that
you give to GitHub for validating webhooks. Generate it using any reasonable
randomness-generator, eg openssl rand -hex 20
.
$ openssl rand -hex 20 > /path/to/hook/secret
$ kubectl create secret -n prow generic hmac-token --from-file=hmac=/path/to/hook/secret
Afterwards, edit your GitHub app and set Webhook secret
to the value of /path/to/hook/secret
.
The github-token
is the RSA private key and app id you created above for the GitHub App.
kubectl create secret -n prow generic github-token --from-file=cert=/path/to/github/cert --from-literal=appid=<<The ID of your app>>
There are two sample manifests to get you started:
starter-s3.yaml
sets up a minio as blob storage for logs and is particularly well suited to quickly get something working. NOTE: this method requires 2 PVs of 100Gi each.starter-gcs.yaml
uses GCS as blob storage and requires additional configuration to set up the bucket and ServiceAccounts. See this for details.starter-azure.yaml
uses Azure as blob storage and requires MinIO deployment. See this for details.
Note: It will deploy prow in the prow
namespace of the cluster.
Regardless of which object storage you choose, the below adjustments are always needed:
- The GitHub app cert by replacing the
<<insert-downloaded-cert-here>>
string - The GitHub app id by replacing the
<<insert-the-app-id-here>>
string - The hmac token by replacing the
<< insert-hmac-token-here >>
string - The domain by replacing the
<< your-domain.com >>
string - Optionally, you can update the
cert-manager.io/cluster-issuer:
annotation if you use cert-manager - Your GitHub organization(s) by replacing the
<< your_github_org >>
string
First you need to create the ProwJob custom resource:
kubectl apply --server-side=true -f config/prow/cluster/prowjob-crd/prowjob_customresourcedefinition.yaml
Apply the manifest you edited above by executing one of the following three commands:
kubectl apply -f config/prow/cluster/starter/starter-s3.yaml
kubectl apply -f config/prow/cluster/starter/starter-gcs.yaml
kubectl apply -f config/prow/cluster/starter/starter-azure.yaml
After a moment, the cluster components will be running.
$ kubectl get pods -n prow
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
crier-69b6bd8f48-6sg24 1/1 Running 0 9m54s
deck-7f6867c46c-j7nnh 1/1 Running 0 2m5s
deck-7f6867c46c-mkxzk 1/1 Running 0 2m5s
ghproxy-fdd45dfb6-582fh 1/1 Running 0 9m54s
hook-7cc4df66f7-r2qpl 1/1 Running 1 9m53s
hook-7cc4df66f7-shnjq 1/1 Running 1 9m53s
horologium-7976c7f597-ss86t 1/1 Running 0 9m53s
minio-d756b6477-d4w4k 1/1 Running 0 9m53s
prow-controller-manager-657767bb69-5qzhp 1/1 Running 0 9m53s
sinker-8b645d469-jjw8r 1/1 Running 0 9m53s
statusreconciler-669697d466-zqfsj 1/1 Running 0 3m11s
tide-65489c49b8-rpnn2 1/1 Running 0 3m2s
Find out your external address. It might take a couple of minutes for the IP to show up.
kubectl get ingress -n prow prow
NAME CLASS HOSTS ADDRESS PORTS AGE
prow <none> prow.<<your-domain.com>> an.ip.addr.ess 80, 443 22d
Go to that address in a web browser and verify that the "echo-test" job has a green check-mark next to it. At this point you have a prow cluster that is ready to start receiving GitHub events!
To set up the webhook, you have to go the GitHub UI and edit your app. Update
the Webhook URL
property to https://prow.<<your-domain.com>>/hook
. Use the URL
shown above when getting the Ingress
.
To install Prow for an org or repo, go to your GitHub app -> Install app
and select the organizations to
install the app in. If you want to install the app in other accounts than the one that created it, you need
to make it public. To do so, go to Advanced
-> Make this GitHub app public
. After it is public, everyone
can install it (Prow will not do anything for orgs or repos it doesn't have configuration for though).
When using GitHub Enterprise (GHE), Prow must be configured slightly differently. It's possible to run GHE with or
without the api
subdomain:
- with the
api
subdomain the endpoints are:- v3:
https://api.<<github-hostname>>
- graphql:
https://api.<<github-hostname>>/graphql
- v3:
- without the
api
subdomain the endpoints are:- v3:
https://<<github-hostname>>/api/v3
- graphql:
https://<<github-hostname>>/api/graphql
- v3:
Prow component configuration:
-
ghproxy
:- configure arg:
--upstream=<<v3-endpoint>>
- the
ghproxy
will not be able to proxy graphql requests when GHE is not using theapi
subdomain (because it tries to use the wrong context path for graphql)
- configure arg:
-
crier
,deck
,hook
,status-reconciler
,tide
,prow-controller-manager
:- configure args:
--github-endpoint=http://ghproxy
--github-endpoint=<<v3-endpoint>>
- with
api
subdomain:--github-graphql-endpoint=http://ghproxy/graphql
- without
api
subdomain:--github-graphql-endpoint=<<graphql-endpoint>>
- configure args:
-
deck
,hook
,tide
,prow-controller-manager
:- configure arg:
--github-host=<<github-hostname>>
- configure arg:
Prow global configuration (config.yaml
):
- configure
github.link_url: "https://<<github-hostname>>"
ProwJob configuration:
- ensure that
clone_uri
andpath_alias
are always set:clone_uri
:https://<<github-hostname>>/<<org>>/<<repo>>.git
path_alias
:<<github-hostname>>/<<org>>/<<repo>>
- it might be necessary to configure
plank.default_decoration_config_entries[].ssh_host_fingerprints
You now have a working Prow cluster (Woohoo!), but it isn't doing anything interesting yet. This section will help you complete any additional setup that your instance may need.
If you want to persist logs and output in Azure, you need to follow the steps below.
By default, Prow doesn't support Azure blob storage for storing job metadata, logs, and artifacts. However, with MinIO it is possible to keep artifacts in Azure blob storage as one would in GCS or S3. MinIO Gateway adds Amazon S3 compatibility to Azure Blob Storage. As such, we can mimic S3 storage for Prow, while actually pushing artifacts to the Azure storage. To run MinIO in gateway mode with Azure being the backend storage, we need to pass the following arguments to MinIO deployment:
args:
- gateway # mode of MinIO
- azure # storage provider
- --console-address=:"<<CHANGE_ME_MINIO_CONSOLE_PORT>>" # predictable port number of the web console. E.g. 33333
In order to configure the Azure storage, follow the following steps:
- create a storage account.
- update MinIO deployment and
s3-credential
Secret with your Azure BlobStorage account name and key. - update MinIO deployment and
minio-console
with your desired port number for accessing its web-console.minio-console
service is optional and only necessary if you plan to access MinIO web-console. - create the following containers in
your Azure BlobStorage account where Prow will push various artifacts:
prow-logs
status-reconciler
tide
- apply starter-azure.yaml.
If you want to persist logs and output in GCS, you need to follow the steps below.
When configuring Prow jobs to use the Pod utilities
with decorate: true
, job metadata, logs, and artifacts will be uploaded
to a GCS bucket in order to persist results from tests and allow for the
job overview page to load those results at a later point. In order to run
these jobs, it is required to set up a GCS bucket for job outputs. If your
Prow deployment is targeted at an open source community, it is strongly
suggested to make this bucket world-readable.
In order to configure the bucket, follow the following steps:
- provision a new service account for interaction with the bucket
- create the bucket
- (optionally) expose the bucket contents to the world
- grant access to admin the bucket for the service account
- Either use a Kubernetes service account bound to the GCP service account (recommended on GKE):
- Create a Kubernetes service account in the namespace where jobs will run.
- Bind the Kubernetes service account to the GCP service account.
- edit the
plank
configuration fordefault_decoration_config_entries[].config.default_service_account_name
to point to the Kubernetes service account.
- OR use a GCP service account key file:
- serialize a key for the service account
- upload the key to a
Secret
under theservice-account.json
key - edit the
plank
configuration fordefault_decoration_config_entries[].config.gcs_credentials_secret
to point to theSecret
above
After downloading the gcloud
tool and authenticating,
the following collection of commands will execute the above steps for you:
You will need to change the bucket name from
gs://your-bucket-name/
to a globally unique one and use that instead instarter-gcs.yaml
too.
$ gcloud iam service-accounts create prow-gcs-publisher
$ identifier="$(gcloud iam service-accounts list --filter 'name:prow-gcs-publisher' --format 'value(email)')"
$ gsutil mb gs://your-bucket-name/ # step 2
$ gsutil iam ch allUsers:objectViewer gs://your-bucket-name # step 3
$ gsutil iam ch "serviceAccount:${identifier}:objectAdmin" gs://your-bucket-name # step 4
$ gcloud iam service-accounts keys create --iam-account "${identifier}" service-account.json # step 5
$ kubectl -n test-pods create secret generic gcs-credentials --from-file=service-account.json # step 6
$ kubectl -n prow create secret generic gcs-credentials --from-file=service-account.json # this secret is also needed by deployments in the prow namespace
Before we can update plank's default_decoration_config_entries[]
we'll need to retrieve the version of plank. Check the deployment file or use the following:
$ kubectl get pod -n prow -l app=plank -o jsonpath='{.items[0].spec.containers[0].image}' | cut -d: -f2
v20191108-08fbf64ac
Then, we can use that tag to retrieve the corresponding utility images in default_decoration_config_entries[]
in config.yaml
:
For more information on how the pod utility images for prow are versioned see generic-autobumper and the autobump config used for prow.k8s.io
plank:
default_decoration_config_entries:
- config:
utility_images: # using the tag we identified above
clonerefs: "gcr.io/k8s-prow/clonerefs:v20191108-08fbf64ac"
initupload: "gcr.io/k8s-prow/initupload:v20191108-08fbf64ac"
entrypoint: "gcr.io/k8s-prow/entrypoint:v20191108-08fbf64ac"
sidecar: "gcr.io/k8s-prow/sidecar:v20191108-08fbf64ac"
gcs_configuration:
bucket: prow-artifacts # the bucket we just made
path_strategy: explicit
gcs_credentials_secret: gcs-credentials # the secret we just made
There are two ways to configure jobs:
- Using the inrepoconfig feature to configure jobs inside the repo under test
- Using the static config by editing the
config
configmap, some samples below:
Add the following to config.yaml
:
periodics:
- interval: 10m
name: echo-test
decorate: true
spec:
containers:
- image: alpine
command: ["/bin/date"]
postsubmits:
YOUR_ORG/YOUR_REPO:
- name: test-postsubmit
decorate: true
spec:
containers:
- image: alpine
command: ["/bin/printenv"]
presubmits:
YOUR_ORG/YOUR_REPO:
- name: test-presubmit
decorate: true
always_run: true
skip_report: true
spec:
containers:
- image: alpine
command: ["/bin/printenv"]
Again, run the following to test the files, replacing the paths as necessary:
$ go run ./prow/cmd/checkconfig --plugin-config=path/to/plugins.yaml --config-path=path/to/config.yaml
Now run the following to update the configmap.
$ kubectl create configmap -n prow config \
--from-file=config.yaml=path/to/config.yaml --dry-run=server -o yaml | kubectl replace configmap -n prow config -f -
We create a make
rule:
update-config: get-cluster-credentials
kubectl create configmap -n prow config --from-file=config.yaml=config.yaml --dry-run=server -o yaml | kubectl replace configmap -n prow config -f -
Presubmits and postsubmits are triggered by the trigger
plugin. Be sure to
enable that plugin by adding it to the list you created in the last section.
Now when you open a PR it will automatically run the presubmit that you added
to this file. You can see it on your prow dashboard. Once you are happy that it
is stable, switch skip_report
in the above config.yaml
to false
. Then, it will post a status on the
PR. When you make a change to the config and push it with make update-config
,
you do not need to redeploy any of your cluster components. They will pick up
the change within a few minutes.
When you push or merge a new change to the git repo, the postsubmit job will run.
For more information on the job environment, see jobs.md
You may choose to run test pods in a separate cluster entirely. This is a good practice to keep testing isolated from Prow's service components and secrets. It can also be used to furcate job execution to different clusters.
One can use a Kubernetes kubeconfig
file (i.e. Config
object) to instruct Prow components to use the build cluster(s).
All contexts in kubeconfig
are used as build clusters and the InClusterConfig
(or current-context
) is the default.
NOTE: See the create-build-cluster.sh
script to help you quickly create and register a GKE cluster as a build cluster for a Prow instance. Continue reading for information about registering a build cluster by hand.
Create a secret containing a kubeconfig
like this:
apiVersion: v1
clusters:
- name: default
cluster:
certificate-authority-data: fake-ca-data-default
server: https://1.2.3.4
- name: other
cluster:
certificate-authority-data: fake-ca-data-other
server: https://5.6.7.8
contexts:
- name: default
context:
cluster: default
user: default
- name: other
context:
cluster: other
user: other
current-context: default
kind: Config
preferences: {}
users:
- name: default
user:
token: fake-token-default
- name: other
user:
token: fake-token-other
Use gencred to create the kubeconfig
file (and credentials) for accessing the cluster(s):
NOTE:
gencred
will merge new entries to the specifiedoutput
file on successive invocations by default .
Create a default cluster context (if one does not already exist):
NOTE: If executing
gencred
like below, ensure--output
is an absolute path.
$ go run ./gencred \
--context=<kube-context> \
--name=default \
--output=/tmp/kubeconfig.yaml \
--serviceaccount
Create one or more build cluster contexts:
NOTE: the
current-context
of the existingkubeconfig
will be preserved.
$ go run ./gencred \
--context=<kube-context> \
--name=other \
--output=/tmp/kubeconfig.yaml \
--serviceaccount
Create a secret containing the kubeconfig.yaml
in the cluster:
$ kubectl --context=<kube-context> create secret generic kubeconfig --from-file=config=/tmp/kubeconfig.yaml
Mount this secret into the prow components that need it (at minimum: plank
,
sinker
and deck
) and set the --kubeconfig
flag to the location you mount it at. For
instance, you will need to merge the following into the plank deployment:
spec:
containers:
- name: plank
args:
- --kubeconfig=/etc/kubeconfig/config # basename matches --from-file key
volumeMounts:
- name: kubeconfig
mountPath: /etc/kubeconfig
readOnly: true
volumes:
- name: kubeconfig
secret:
defaultMode: 0644
secretName: kubeconfig # example above contains a `config` key
Configure jobs to use the non-default cluster with the cluster:
field.
The above example kubeconfig.yaml
defines two clusters: default
and other
to schedule jobs, which we can use as follows:
periodics:
- name: cluster-unspecified
# cluster:
interval: 10m
decorate: true
spec:
containers:
- image: alpine
command: ["/bin/date"]
- name: cluster-default
cluster: default
interval: 10m
decorate: true
spec:
containers:
- image: alpine
command: ["/bin/date"]
- name: cluster-other
cluster: other
interval: 10m
decorate: true
spec:
containers:
- image: alpine
command: ["/bin/date"]
This results in:
- The
cluster-unspecified
andcluster-default
jobs run in thedefault
cluster. - The
cluster-other
job runs in theother
cluster.
See gencred for more details about how to create/update kubeconfig.yaml
.
PRs satisfying a set of predefined criteria can be configured to be automatically merged by Tide.
Tide can be enabled by modifying config.yaml
.
See how to configure tide for more details.
GitHub Oauth is required for PR Status
and for the rerun button on Prow Status.
To enable these features, follow the
instructions in github_oauth_setup.md
.
Use cert-manager for automatic LetsEncrypt integration. If you already have a cert then follow the official docs to set up HTTPS termination. Promote your ingress IP to static IP. On GKE, run:
$ gcloud compute addresses create [ADDRESS_NAME] --addresses [IP_ADDRESS] --region [REGION]
Point the DNS record for your domain to point at that ingress IP. The convention
for naming is prow.org.io
, but of course that's not a requirement.
Then, install cert-manager as described in its readme. You don't need to run it in a separate namespace.