Pipeline: the game that delivers

Pipeline game app is developed by Eficode and Xtreamers.io

Table of Content

1. Introduction
2. System Requirements
3. Setup Firebase project
4. How to run
   a. Run locally
   b. Run with Firebase
5. How to make a production-ready build
6. How to deploy to Firebase
7. General project structure

✏️ Introduction

Introduction taken from Eficode's Pipeline page.

"What testing steps should you include in your Continuous Delivery pipeline? Don’t just string together existing manual processes - use simple, collaborative tools to design something better!

Creating a Continuous Delivery (CD) pipeline is a key development in an organization’s transformation to DevOps. A CD Pipeline covers all the activities needed to transform a code change made by a developer into updated software bringing value to users. Steps in the pipeline include building a new version of the software as well as testing and deploying it. Exactly what kinds of build, test and deployment steps will depend on many factors and there is no ‘one perfect pipeline’ which will suit all situations.

I created the card game ‘Pipeline’ as a quick and fun way to explore alternatives for a CD pipeline without actually building anything. The goal of the game is to design a pipeline for a given scenario and optimize the deployment lead time. You work in a small group and get to discuss what steps are needed and which order you want to do them in. You will run into design tradeoff decisions and may discover people have different risk tolerances. If you play the game a second time with a different scenario, or compare notes with another group, you can learn more about how different scenarios drive different decisions.

Playing the game should help you to build a real pipeline for the real software system you are working on. Building a CD pipeline needs specialist knowledge of particular tools and could be many weeks of work. Playing this game should help you to avoid some costly misunderstandings. It’s also a fun way to engage a small group for an hour or two while you think through the issues you’re facing."

Well, this repository is just the digital version of this card game!

📝 System Requirements

You need to have Node 12. This is because, at the time of writing, the highest stable Node version supported by Cloud Functions is Node 12. Please check your node version using node -v. If you have a different version of Node, we recommend using nvm (or the corresponding windows implementation) to manage your Node versions.

⚙️ Setup Firebase project

To run against your own Firebase project you have to

• create a new firebase project
• update .firebaserc file with your project id

Firebase doc contains a great set-up guide to start with the web sdk from scratch.

This project uses firestore and realtime database, so create both!

📜 How to run

After cloning this repository, move into the root folder and execute the following two scripts, which have been defined in the package.json:

npm run bootstrap
npm run build

The first command will install all the dependencies needed to run the project, while the second command builds each package contained in the lerna monorepo.

Firebase and Environment variables setup

At the moment of writing, it is not possible to run the firebase emulators without configuring a whole firebase project through the firebase console. Thus, even if you want to only run the project locally, you still need to create a firebase project.

Once you have done that, please create a .env file and put it into the game-app folder. This .env file should contain and define values for the environment variables shown in this template file. Therefore, feel free to copy this template, rename it, and fill the values of the variables defined in it. Many of these variables can be filled with values from your firebase project console. For the remaining variables, please keep on reading the following sections.

Run Locally

First of all, make sure you have followed the instructions for the setup of Firebase and the environment variables.
We use Firebase Emulators to use the Firebase services locally.

Firebase Emulators

To start the emulators, move into the root folder and run

npm run start:emulators

Again, this script is defined in the root package.json.
Make sure you have port 5000, 5001, 5555, 8080, 9000 and 9090 available. Then, go to the .env file created in the previous step (the one in the game-app folder) and fill in the following variables as follows:

REACT_APP_FIREBASE_USE_EMULATORS=true
FIREBASE_AUTH_EMULATOR_HOST=localhost:9099
FIRESTORE_EMULATOR_HOST=localhost:8080

Note: If you need these ports and cannot make them available, you can always configure the firebase emulators by modifying the firebase.json. If you do so, please remember to modify any reference to such ports in the environment variables.

Root Environment variables

Before running the project, you will need to create a .env file also in the root folder containing the following environment variables:

FIRESTORE_EMULATOR_HOST=localhost:8080
FIREBASE_AUTH_EMULATOR_HOST=localhost:9099
FIREBASE_DATABASE_EMULATOR_HOST=localhost:9000
GCLOUD_PROJECT=pipeline-game-development

If you want to skip signup and email verification you can add

CREATE_TEST_USER=true

This will create a test user with email [email protected] and password Test1234

Running

Run the following script in the root folder to initialize the local emulators:

npm run scripts:load-initial-data:local

This will fill the emulators with some initial data needed to load the application.

And now the last step: move into the game-app folder and run:

npm run start

and your Pipeline react app will be available for you to use.

Run with Firebase

First of all, make sure you have followed the instructions for the setup of Firebase and the environment variables.
Make sure you have your firebase project up and running. Then, go to the .env file you have created (the one in the game-app folder) and fill in the following variables as follows:

REACT_APP_FIREBASE_USE_EMULATORS=false

The other environment variables concerning the emulators can be left undefined, since we are not using the emulators in this section. If you want to run locally using the emulators, please refer to this section.
Finally, you just have to move into the game-app folder and run:

npm run start

and your Pipeline react app will be available for you to use.

🏗️ How to make a production-ready build

This step is also included in the How to run section, but we rewrite it here for completeness.

Just go to the root folder and execute the following scripts:

npm run bootstrap
npm run build

This will create a production-ready build of the packages for which it is possible to do so.

🚀 How to deploy to Firebase

After building the project, you can easily deploy to your Firebase project running:

npx firebase deploy --project <FIREBASE_PROJECT_ID>

This command will automatically deploy the following projects to firebase:

• Firestore rules and indexes
• RealTime Database rules
• Cloud functions
• Hosting (game-app)

Please, refer to the Firebase documentation for details about how to use the firebase deploy command.

Initialize remote database

To load initial data into the firestore remote database change your root env file, removing the firebase emulator variable and adding the reference to your admin credentials json file

GCLOUD_PROJECT=
GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=

and then run again

npm run scripts:load-initial-data:local

tags: Pipeline Documentation README Eficode xtream