Adding an application

An application is a collection of resources and configurations that are managed together. It represents the service which you are going to deploy. With PipeCD, all the application manifests and its application configuration (app.pipecd.yaml) must be committed into a directory of a Git repository. That directory is called as application directory.

Each application is managed by exactly one piped instance. However, a single piped can manage multiple applications.

Starting PipeCD V1, you can deploy virtually any application on your desired platform using plugins. See more about plugins. Currently, the PipeCD maintainers team maintains plugins for Kubernetes and Terraform.

Preparing the application configuration file

You have to prepare a configuration file which contains your application configuration and store that file in the Git repository which your Piped is watching first to enable adding a new application this way. The application configuration file name must be suffixed by .pipecd.yaml because the piped agent periodically checks for files with this suffix.

Note: Make sure that your Application Repository is listed in your piped configuration file. See the piped configuration reference for more details.

The application configuration depends on the plugin that you are using for your deployment. Below is an example of how an appliation configuration file (app.pipecd.yaml) will look like. Please see Plguins and defining application configuration for more details on how to configure your app.pipecd.yaml in accordance with the plugin that you plan to use.

apiVersion: pipecd.dev/v1beta1
kind: Application
spec:
  labels:
    env: example
    team: product
  pipeline:
    stages: {}
    ...
  plugins: {}

Registering your application

Once you have configured your application configuration file, the next step is to register your application.

Registering the application helps PipeCD know:

• where the application configuration is placed
• which piped should handle it and which platform the application should be deployed to.

You can register a new application from the web console (aka the Control Plane) by picking from a list of unused apps suggested by pipeds while scanning the git repositories connected to it.

You can also use the pipectl command-line tool to confiure your application in the Control Plane. See adding a new application using pipectl.

NOTE: Manually configuring the application on the Control Plane is not supported for PipeCD v1 deployments (deployment using plugins) as of now. We are working on this feature.

Go to the PipeCD web console on application list page, click the +ADD button at the top left corner of the application list page and then switch to the PIPED V1 ADD FROM SUGGESTIONS tab.

Select the Piped that you want to use and the deploy target that you want to deploy to. If you have configured your piped configuration file and the Application Repository correctly, all the applications in the target repository will be listed in the ‘Select application to add’ tab. Select the unregistered Applicatiom you want to deploy and click on ‘SAVE’. Your application should now be successfully registered and deploying on PipeCD.

Registering an Application from Suggestions

Updating your application

The web console supports only enable, disable, and delete operations for your deployment. You cannot modify the application details from the web console (aka Control Plane).

To update your application, edit the app.pipecd.yaml file in your Git repository:

apiVersion: pipecd.dev/v1beta1
kind: Application
metadata:
  name: my-app
spec:
  name: new-name
  labels:
    team: new-team

Commit and push the changes. Piped will detect the updates and apply them automatically, according to the configured deployment pipeline.

For all available configuration options, see the configuration reference.