GitHub Demo Days, 8 Jan 2021

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: New CD features from GitHub #DemoDays

Description

An introduction to the new Continuous Delivery (CD) features for GitHub Actions. Integrate required reviewers, environments and more as we securely deploy Azure apps.

2:44 - Intro to James Leha
8:05 - Demo Start
17:05 - Azure App Services and deployment environments
24:44 - More complex deployment examples
36:57 - Setting Environments
40:45 - Environment Monitoring and activity log
43:16 - Secrets, permissions and approvals
49:37 - Workflow view Recap
51:05 - Matrix Builds
55:33 - Pull Request view + Resources

Link to GitHub Repo in the Demo - https://github.com/James-LeHa/DemoDay-Actions-CD
Discussion for this Demo - https://github.com/James-LeHa/DemoDay-Actions-CD/discussions
https://github.com/learn/devops

A

A

A

A

B

It's another great day: we've got so many people from all over the world tuning in some of you have taken the time to stay up in the wee hours of the morning to come, check us out, and I really appreciate that. Hopefully, we've got some good stuff for you today.

B

Today, I'm going to introduce to you james, I'm going to bring him on stream. This is james leija. Everyone, james, is a field solutions engineer here over at github, hey james, how you doing today, hey.

C

I'm doing great man.

B

Yeah, as you can see, uh things are a little different from the last time we did a little broadcast. We've we've got quite a few people watching at this time. What do you think about that? I.

C

Think it's awesome. I think it just shows the kind of breadth of our global audience and the people that use our products and services so be great to hear from everyone here and hopefully you all enjoy the content.

B

Yeah yeah so james, like because we have so many folks watching and checking us out. uh You know everyone comes from completely different backgrounds and understandings of things like what exactly is a solutions engineer? What was your role and how did you kind of come into that uh here at github.

C

Excellent, a great question man and yeah. So as a github solutions engineer, that means a few different things: a few different companies, but here especially it's a pre-sales engineer role, something people probably commonly hear it as and really our job is to make sure that our customers are enabled understand our products and services, and that really see us as a trust advisor, because, if they're able to use the things that they purchase and they have in their company enterprises. What's the point.

C

So we want to make sure that things are usable accessible to all developers across the world and across your organization, as well as making sure that your relationship with github remains. We want to take your feedback to our product group. We want to make sure that you're accessing our betas and alpha programs right for some cool new features and you're helping us build the platform that you want to use every single day.

B

Okay, so would you consider yourself, like a first point of contact if someone needs help with uh you know something on github or if they're just getting started or or do you more come into play once uh you know, there's already an established relationship and there's a very specific uh project that that folks are working on yeah.

C

That's a that's a good one to ask right there too, and for us you know we usually get in contact with our different accounts, as they are expressing interest in the git of experience right, so whether it be from initial calls to just done with a product or talk about what your current state is with your solutions. So we're usually the first point of contact for technical questions. Troubleshooting approval concepts, documentation during the initial stages of our relationship together as a company and then in the enablement phase as well.

C

We're going to be, alongside with our different customers, making sure that they understand the use of solutions and getting them any other support they need from whether it be our professional services, team or enterprise support as well. So definitely that kind of initial part relationship, but want to make sure you have half for success going forward as well.

B

All right and and if I'm someone who is new to tech, maybe I'm just like in a boot camp, trying to decide like how to get into tech and whatnot like. How would you say, is the pathway uh to becoming a solutions engineer like what what would drive you along that pathway.

C

Great great great question, and for me you know I was previously at microsoft um as a consultant for a couple years, and I've always really been interested in the technical side.

C

Of course, the solutions building different implementations just really playing around with things, and hopefully you can see some of the day but always was extremely interested in the customer facing side as well, making sure customers understand what solutions are out there, just understanding what your problems are and how we can fix that with technology, regardless of your tech stack or where you're at just getting you to that better place for your developers and for your customers, because we know that technology is key to innovation and, uh to be honest, I was never good enough to be an actual software engineer.

C

B

C

Truthful answer well.

B

uh So was microsoft, your first job in tech or uh what was your first job.

C

Gotcha gotcha yeah- that was my first job out of university. um They have a consulting program for call chiros, so anyone who's interested in that definitely recommend you look into it. I believe it's called aspire now, but microsoft's a great place for new hires. They, you know, have college highs, of course, for software engineering, but of course, for the professional services, sales teams and really everything in between. So it's a great place for new college highs across the world. I've met a lot of great friends from australia.

B

C

uh That were also college highers when we met up in person actually in seattle after our first year.

B

Awesome awesome great. Well, I think that's a great way to kind of start things going. um I I see that there are a lot of folks from their folks from belarus, so hello, ilya, hello, naveen, uh who's asking who are we live for we're live for you um and then I'm also going to introduce uh brian here who's. Also in the uh field solution, field, solutions, engineering, group and oops wrong, one. Let's try this again: hey brian how's. It going.

A

Hey aj and james, I am good and ready to perform my sole function in this demo, which is to approve a deployment to azure. So looking forward to that, this is uh this is james show today, but you can catch me in about three weeks uh when I'll be doing something similar uh with some of the ui uh improvements that we've introduced over the last couple of months.

B

Awesome all right, we'll see you soon so james. What are we going to tackle today.

C

Right so today we're going to be looking at uh github actions, especially some of the new features that we've released since give universe december 15th many of you've probably seen blog articles or saw the different recordings on youtube that we had from our sessions.

C

um But github actions has been, I think, a really great hit across the world over 6 700 actions created since november of last year, but the cd portion of that from approvals reviewers, those kind of gates of making sure how do we protect our production environment, those really weren't in there until now. So it's currently in beta for public repos, that's what we're looking at and also available in beta for private repos, for our enterprise customers via by price cloud.

C

So that's what we're taking a look at and seeing how we can fit that into a pretty common use case. I think deploying a solution up to azure or really any cloud of your choice, but we're using azure today.

A

C

All right, so, let's go ahead and get my screen shared and walk through this with everyone and along the way, uh we'll be monitoring, chat, so feel free to ask questions and everything like that and we'll try to get to the ones we can so we're actually been looking at this public repository, I have you can actually go out to my repo and look at it's live right now. So definitely recommend that.

C

But what we want to see is this scenario of you know having a solution, an app, an environment you need to deploy, and you want to make sure it's going to go through all of your proper cice checks. Right. You want to make sure you're testing it you're, building it you're deploying up to sandbox keyway before you eventually prove it into prod. So how can you do that in a secure fashion with some of the new github capabilities of git actions?

C

So this is this really simple, node.js app that I have it's just going to deploy a really simple web app and it's going to actually let us look up different users on github. So actually, let's open this in our developer in github code spaces, so codespaces is something that's actually embedded right now for public repos and you can actually try it today. I believe- and this is something that allows you to have a ide in the cloud.

C

So, as you know, this is a good experience very similar to vs code for anyone's familiar with it. So I figured why not use it for our demo as well. I'll include some resources in my readme, where you can look at some introduction videos to the concepts if you want interested, but as we can see here, we have my developer opened and we're actually going to. Let's actually first take a look at what this solution is doing, so I'm actually going to go ahead and run this.

C

As you can see, it's actually going to open this in my local host. That's actually the local host of this containerized development environment. So I open it up here. You can now see that this code, spaces environment, has opened up for me an 8 000 port, so I can actually test my node.js application.

C

As I mentioned, it's a really simple web app and all we're going to do. Is it's going to search any given user you want by just entering in their name, so I'm going to search my colleague, brian cross. You guys heard earlier there's this handsome fella and just pull some information from his get a profile.

C

It also has a error page as well just to make sure there's no problems and gets caught.

C

So we can see here that we're testing this and running this from our vs code operation, but it's kind of a blank website right now, so let's actually go fix this up a little bit test it and then actually go through our deployment processes that we traditionally have seen before and let's see how the new cicd capabilities, workflow visualization will fit in play all right. So I'm going to go over here to my solution.

C

We saw it's kind of a blank website, so actually, let's, uh let's make it a bit more interactive, or at least a little prettier in the background. So I'm actually going to ask the audience here. If I can see some of the comments, so we have a couple different images we can use for the background. We currently have this blank cap, this one. So we have one called office theme right here. We have another one called keyboard for any of those that love mechanical keyboards and a couple of just more nature, focused ones.

C

So is there any preference from the audience on what type of environment to use? Let me know in chat and we'll go ahead and fit that in there and while I'm waiting for you guys to see, let me also update the home page of this, so I go to my index layout.

C

Let me just go ahead and add into.

A

C

C

Banner nice little banner message for it go and save this, and let me go actually refresh my localhost all right cool. We see the header updating. That's awesome. I've seen a couple different comments here. Oh man, it's a pretty split audience. So let me just go with the most recent one, I'm seeing here from you shane the cpa: let's go with the keyboard one, so I'm going to go back over to my style sheet.

C

Let's update my background to the keyboard and I can't lie that's actually my personal favorite one so sorry to everyone else, but we can definitely try some other ones in.

B

C

Demo, all right great, so it pulled over the keyboard background, update our header and looks like we can search for user still excellent. So, let's go back here see we made some changes, I'm actually going to open up. Let me actually quit out of the localhost. Let me just run my test real quick once again as you're, probably seeing this is exactly what I do in vs code, every single day, except now, it's intrinsically tied to my get a repository and just one thing about code space. This is containerized, it's reusable!

C

So no longer we struggling with the it works on my machine, but not your machine or I need to download the right package, the right version of npm or python, whichever containerize these images with your extensions, your preferences and they can reuse them or share others inside your team, your company, your organization, all right, so it looks like we have a couple changes made in here so great.

C

Let's actually look at a couple of different azure deployments, we're going to do using github actions and kind of walk through what the experience has been like up to this point and what it can now be with the new cd capabilities of github actions. So we have a couple different yaml files out there. You can take a look at, but for this first one.

C

What we're doing is we're actually just going to do a really simple deployment right here, we're going to deploy it into our main branch.

C

And whenever pull request occurs, we're actually going to grab a couple of these different environment variables, we're setting you're, probably familiar with so we're going to set this up to using our other job. So we're going to use this azure web app. We have this version of node and then we're going to go through doing our build and test step, and then our deployment step here we're just going to check out our code, setup, node and then actually use our azure web deploy action.

C

That's available in the azure organization, a public github action that anyone can use we're going to feed in our azure web app, and then the secret we have to provide is a published profile from the azure web app as well. That I'll show you we're going to put it into our sandbox deployment slot and then we're just running this validate job here. All it is is a really simple action I actually found from the community. It's a url health checker.

C

So once this is deployed, it just makes sure whatever url we're using is actually up and live and we're getting a response back from. It makes sense all right, so let's go ahead and deploy this up into my repo, we'll do a push and then we can see this triggering out some jobs for us. So we went ahead and update the branch.

C

Using the keyboard background, all right, let's get push one. Let me actually go back up and open up my repository there.

C

So we just did a push-up to my repo right once again from code spaces cool you can see it was pushed just a minute ago. I can actually create a pull request from here, but why not if some people have not experimented with the github cli?

C

So if we look right here, I'm going to actually use the git of coi, so just using gh, I'm actually going to use a pr object and I'm going to create one.

C

Let's me so yeah I'm going to take this pull request from my feature branch into my main branch. So I need to go ahead and give it a title.

C

Let's give the body if I'd like to I'll, just skip it, and then I can actually do a couple things. Let me just submit this right here. I can continue in the browser and add some metadata to it. I'm just going to go and submit it.

C

Okay looks like that all finished up. If we go back here to my repo, we can see hey a new pull request was created. That's what we expected, and now we can see.

C

That's went ahead and kicked off a bit of action, so something standard, I'm sure you guys have been familiar with before we go over here to our actions tab. We can see this action has just been deployed. So let me show you actually where it's going to be deployed to so we can understand some of the context and what we've set up so far, so for those familiar with azure app services really simple uh way to deploy different solutions or websites up into an azure website itself and right here.

C

All we've done is inside this resource group have app service plan and app service. So this app service we're going to take a couple of different things. So, of course we have the name of it. That's what we specified in our yaml file that you probably saw, but we also have a couple different deployment slots as well, because I want to deploy to multiple different environments um at the same time or I want them to be gated, I don't want to just deploy it to one static website all the time.

C

So what I love is, you can just add different deployment slots name them whatever you want to staging uat production. Doesn't matter and right here you can see I've already created one for sandbox and qa. So how do I does azure know what environment for me to actually deploy into. As you can see, we didn't actually do any like azure login job using the service principle or anything you totally could, but that might expose you to a very large range of credentials and permissions that you're, given that one single login to do.

C

Instead, we can actually use a published profile all right so right here. We can see that in this app service, this is for my sandbox environment and this is option actually get a published profile. So you download this. It's just going to open up, it's just a text file and then once you have that you can actually paste that content into your github actions secret and now reference it. It's going to contain a username and some generate passwords.

C

So it's definitely a sensitive file and you can see there's even an option to reset it to make sure it's secure. But that's how you're going to do this. You can do this for each of your different environments that we saw earlier. So I can do that for my staging for my qa publish profile and then for my primary production. One we're gonna do the same thing as well. That we've already done actually get a publish profile.

C

A

C

So that's kind of the background we're actually pulling this to. Let's actually look at my sandbox environment, real quick, let's see if it's been deployed to yet just so, we can maybe see a before and after all, right. So you can see this is an azure website out there, okay. So this is the blank website I had previously remember. We doesn't have our new nice background. The keyboard doesn't have a header either.

C

So now, if I go back over here to my github actions, let's see what the status of everything is. So the first thing you're noticing here is this nice little workflow, visualization, graphic okay. This wasn't here before um it was added in some of our recent releases over the past month or so from those announcements and we're gonna see how this can actually be really nice to just see these more complex workflows in action and how things are working with one another. So right here we're gonna, see hey.

C

It sees three different jobs inside of this yaml file itself, the build and test job the web app deploy job to sandbox and then the validate deployment job. Okay, those are the three jobs once again from our workflow yaml file. We saw earlier right our job for building tests.

B

Yeah no problem, sorry to break in uh I've, got to.

C

Worry about requests.

B

To kind of uh rewind a little bit and see how.

C

B

Lost on the last step.

C

Yeah, that's totally fine y'all. So, let's, let's start back from a few other steps now. So let's get back here to azure, real, quick and just a reminder right we're going to be deploying here from our github action, so the different values and credentials we need. One is just the app service name itself: phenomenal dash github and the published profile itself is going to point to this specific deployment slot.

C

We have right because we're going to actually deploy three different versions of this we're going to ploy to sandbox environment, keyway and eventually to the production one. So that's where you get the published profile for each of these respective environments, so we went ahead and did that for the sandbox one and let me actually show you where that's stored inside a repo, because that's what our action is referencing and using. So I go back here to make it action.

C

We saw the different jobs that are running currently, it's deploying the web deployed to sandbox and actually look at that job one more time, so here it's actually going to go and deploy to our sandbox environment, and what's it doing, we actually specify here? This is parameter for this git of action. The web app deploy this is one azure makes. I did not create this action. The great part of actions is the reusable components made by large companies or just users out there, and one of the parameters you can specify is actually the slot name.

C

So I'm going to specify that slot name we saw in my azure portal sandbox and then I'm going to actually also specify the secret published profile for sandbox. This is something I actually want to kind of focus on a little bit. Every time you want to deploy to a different environment, you have to have your secret stored inside github and you have to specify each secret for each type of environment or whatever variable it belongs to right, we're deploying in different environments. They have different connection, strings keys, published profiles whichever it may be.

C

So that's fine, but when you have larger deployments or you're trying to scale us out, that can become a bit of a pain sometimes and we'll actually look and see how github can alleviate that with some of these new cd capabilities, all right, so it looks like my job's actually just finished. So let's go back to the summary page right here. You can see green all on the way and what actually happened in each of these. So it looks like our build and test it ran.

C

Npm ran our test. Everything passed, our sandbox deployment, went ahead and deployed to azure all right. We got to get a response back and then my validate deployment step really simple job. uh This could actually just be a step inside, but I wanted to keep it outside just to show what it's doing and actually seemed like it made the euro request for us. It checked it and got back a positive response, so we go back in here. We can actually now see where it's actually deployed. So it's saying deploy to this url.

C

So I click this. We can see all right. My website has just updated and it matches what I had in my code spaces earlier right. So this was the previous website before this update. Let me refresh the browser and we can actually see. That's now been picked up, and sometimes this takes it a little bit with the incognito browser and whatnot, but let's just confirm that it's all good to go all right great. We got a keyboard in there that we chose earlier.

C

I think that was shane that specified that and then we can see phenomenal devs in here as well all right, so the website's up, let's just make sure it works, that's good for someone all right once we've got a good response. Actually, if anyone has a, um oh people want to zoom in. Let me zoom in a little bit for y'all. If anyone has a github user handle, they want me to search, go ahead and put in chat, and I can actually search uh for you all as well. While I focus on my.

A

C

C

So I'm gonna zoom in a little bit more and once again, if y'all have any problems seen or anything like that, just let me know I've seen a couple questions in chat um right here. A couple around um you know wide node, not c sharp. You know node.js just simple solution, and this was a really simple web app to do as well.

C

It's actually a guide actually followed for this in the readme can see, but obviously you could deploy this with csharp.net web apps, really whatever you want, it doesn't matter, and so, if you were asking, why not um aws or can we use google cloud or something else you totally can that's a great thing about. Github actions is it's cloud agnostic. It works on any single platform, because these different companies are building actions for it all right and someone in chat actually told me to look up your handle and all right.

C

I see your wannabe programmer and I don't believe that looks like you have quite a bit of experience and things you love about. So I appreciate that in the chat and we'll get some more actually as I'm going through and testing this all right, everyone, so it looks like our web app actually deployed properly. We got our content in here, so that was a really simple example. I'm sure those that have actually worked on this before I've probably seen this- maybe not the workflow versus realization- that's still pretty simple right.

C

So let's actually go back and use some more complex examples to show you how this can affect different environments and kind of how we build this out to accommodate different use cases, and some people are asking if this is going to be recorded and available. And yes, it will be aj correct me if I'm wrong, though, and put on our youtube page at github.youtube.com, github right.

B

Yeah it'll be immediately available on twitch and linkedin right after the stream is done and then yes, we will put it on youtube.

C

Appreciate you, man, all right, so let's go back into my code spaces, and that was our first yaml script, really simple demo, but let's go through and actually work with the next one. So I just deployed to a single environment. All right, that's fine, not a huge deal, but let's create a dependent relationship between two environments or multiple environments. At the same time, so right here, I'm going to deploy once again to my sandbox environment.

C

You saw earlier and you saw they had a secret for sandbox and then I'm also going to deploy at the same time to a qa environment that has its own published uh profile for qa in the secret as well. Remember we took this from azure and we're using this deployment slot name for the different environments we're going to so let me go ahead, commit this change.

C

Should go ahead and trigger.

C

Our github actions, all right- let's see we saw another trigger over here and what this is going to do now is actually send this job. It's actually a more complex version, so, instead of just doing a simple, build and test to sandbox and validate, I actually added a couple different jobs here, so we added in, uh of course, the deploying to keyway as well, but also add in a prettier job.

C

That's just using a prettier for node.js to make sure my code looks all right and also a linter, so this is actually using the give.com github super linter. This one's really cool. It's actually a compilation of a bunch of different linters that github has put together and kind of maintains and allows you to use them. You can see you have a couple different parameters and environment variables.

C

I've entered here, so I'm not going to worry about markdown or css for this run, just because it's all pretty heavy and pretty noisy for the demo purposes, but there's a lot of cool things you can use for it. So sip or linter definitely recommend you check it out all right. So we can see this job, though, is now deploying, and you can see where this visualization is kind of nice, because not only are we using a matrix build for our testing, so now we can test across three different versions of node.

C

At the same time, it's also showing the relationship between each of these. So if you're forget of actions, you know that you can use. This needs keyword right to specify what job has to run before this job is able to go itself or what job actually has to run successfully before this job can run.

C

So we can see here that, if we hover over this, it shows the relationship between all these different jobs. So if I hover over my sandbox job, for example, saying that the matrix build and test and the prettier have to complete and finish before, sandbox can start and the validate deployment is waiting on sandbox to finish before, it will obviously validate where I just deployed to same thing here for my uh qa environment as well in the lint code base, it's actually just by itself. It's just flint.

C

From employ to yet we can see how these things are stand alone, they're connected together, and I think it's just a really nice thing, especially a lot of complicated examples out there that I've heard um different companies use their yaml scripts. So having that visualized in one place, you can kind of scale in now is at least I hope, a little bit easier, but definitely give us feedback on it and hey.

C

If anyone is having issues seeing my screen or anything, let me know I'm seeing one comment in chat, not sure if that's my issue or anything else, but definitely.

B

Let me know if anyone's.

C

Having any problems uh in terms of the visuals all right, so this is going to go ahead and deploy up to my qa environment, and, while it's doing this, let's actually look at my github secrets. So get up secrets are a great way to store your secrets safely and use them inside your ci cd builds. We never want to put a plain text, personal access, token or api key connection string right, so we actually go over here to our secret section. This has been around for a long time. You can use repository secrets.

C

This allows you to create a secret name. It provide it whatever value you can do this once we'll actually be able to see it the time you enter it and once it's added it's there and available, but you can also go in and update a secret if you ever need to change the value of it. Once again, you can't read and see those values it's just available to give action job itself to use.

C

So this is great and you're, seeing here it's where I have my keyway profile and my sandbox profile for the azure web app. This works, but the question is hey: do I want to have a production or pre-production uh value or key or login in this repo secret, that anyone could just use when they're running, to get a action on this repository? We're obviously trusting our team members, but there always needs to be some level of control right. So that's actually something we're going to address in the next example.

C

Here, with this concept of environment secrets, you can see we're actually naming these environments a couple different things, so I know it's a little bit of a teaser, but we're going to get to it right now. So with that problem, let's go back into my github action.

C

We see this go ahead and it's going to be running, which is fine, but.

B

We're actually.

C

Going to go ahead and look at the next version right here so inside of.

C

My next demo yaml, let me actually clean up my first one- and I think I saw someone said live coding is dangerous and yes, it definitely is hopefully limit it to just um commenting in and out lines. Isn't too bad, but you never know so. I appreciate that I call out all right so this next yaml file it's going to be pretty similar to what we did earlier, except we're actually going to introduce this concept of environments and environment variables.

C

So in order to really accommodate a true cd protection and approval gates and reviewers, you need to really reference what each of these different stages of your pipeline are right. Where is our production environment? Where does our qa environment start and where is pre-production?

C

So you can actually do that now inside your gamel, with github actions using this environment keyword under a job. So what this does is under a job, for example, in our web app deploy to sandbox. We have this environment keyword just like you would have keywords for your name for your runs on for your needs. There's now a new one for environment and it's environment. It's not ev, it's not just env for environment variables, it's actually just spelled out environment, so make sure you have that difference whenever you're using this.

C

But with this you can actually do a couple things. You can one specify the environment name all right. So it's going to say, hey this job and everything inside of it. It's related to the sandbox environment, all right! It's great, and you can also add this url component too.

C

So this is great because, instead of having to go through or comment in what the url is or look at the output of the job itself, you can actually now see this inside the github action run in a pretty convenient place that we'll see here in a quick second, when we uh kick this off, but all right, so we're gonna use the environment variable for our sandbox environment, and you can see here actually under my published profile name when.

B

Before I was using.

C

That published profile for sandbox or for qa I had to specify that right, each and each and every single time a different name kind of becomes a pain in the butt. When you have a bunch of environments, you should go through and you're trying to update this over and over again, you want to reuse this, but you're afraid to break it, but instead we're just using azure web app publish profile just once. So, if we go down here to our web app deploy, we did the same thing we did earlier.

C

We have an environment, we're calling this one qa this time and we're also giving it a url for the qa environment.

C

If we go here, though, the publish profile, the secret, it's actually the same secret name as our sandbox environment, and you know if you were using github actions, maybe a month and a half ago, or so before. You made all these cd changes and editions.

C

You would be kind of confused, because that would reference the exact same secret for both of these jobs, mostly steps. So if it's referenced to the same secret house, they're going to deploy to different places, that's right- and that's actually the beauty of using these environments, because we now define secrets for environments themselves. So whenever this job is in the context of an environment like qa, it's just going to look for the secret name that matches what qa is offering. It can still use other repo secrets.

C

You have right, but if you have a specific secret value for your environment, you can just reuse this component and it's going to be able to eliminate and choose the correct one. I know that was a lot of jargon. We'll see you in action, it'll make a lot more sense. There just want to kind of prime up a couple of things, so we can see here we're doing what we kind of did earlier, though we're validating the qa and our last step here.

C

We're actually going to go ahead and deploy this into prod and once again it's doing the same thing I did previously and we're actually using the production slot this time and we're going to also deploy it to using the same name of a secret. It's not the same secret though, because remember it's going to be referencing a different environment, all right and that's going to go and validate this production, employment all right. So let's go back to my jobs over here.

C

Let's take a look at one of these deployments, all right, so our deployments here went ahead through so it's the previous one looks like production looks like the one for sandbox failed. Let's see what's going on here.

C

Let's make sure this is live, looks like it's still up. So let's go ahead and just run this secondary demo right here as well now and we'll deal with any issues we have along the way, because that's what you gotta do all right. So let's go ahead and use our third demo.

C

I'd say, third, but you can see I named these all you know, starting at index zero, so go ahead and push it up.

C

Oh, I should go ahead and show that changes in here for my browser always fun.

C

That might be my bad.

C

All right there we go see that pushed up all right. So, let's see go back into my repository and it looks like this is: go ahead and taken off our jobs. Let me go and see two of these all right, so it's kicking off that one for production, employment and we actually canceled this one. It's one of our previous builds okay. So while it's kicking off, let's look at a couple things. First, you saw the workflow visualization we were using earlier and something cool. I want to point out.

C

You can actually now use emojis in this as well. If you have emojis for your job names. They'll also show up in your privatization, which I think is just a nice little cool add-on. So we're doing the same things. We did previously right doing our building test, we're using prettier to make sure things look good. Our lint code base is not going to kick off as well as our deployment to qa and sandbox, so our production deployment is actually going to be reliant on multiple, different jobs before we can get that step right.

C

So we're saying here that we actually need all the previous jobs to complete and finish before we're going to be able to deploy to production. So our building testings are finished. Our deployments, the prettier, the linter, have to all complete successfully before we're going to be able to approve a production deployment.

C

I said: approve a production employment, not just automatically deploy production and we'll see why? Here, when we look at these environment settings all right, so this is kicking off. Let's give it a little bit of time. Things hopefully should go through smoothly, but not we'll troubleshoot, anything, that's not working, but let's look at where you actually set up all these different settings and functionality.

C

So if I go over to my settings page and go over here to my environments, a new section available, if you're using a public github repo, you should see this or if you're, using github enterprise cloud, you should see it as well and for anyone asking, I think, someone asked earlier. We are currently using github enterprise cloud for this demonstration. Github enterprise server is actually adding support for github actions uh pretty soon of our next release.

C

Coming within the few weeks, all right so here in my environment section you can see, we can actually do a couple things. We can create a new environment when you do that. You just give the environment a.

C

Name, you go ahead and click configure environment and once you're here, you can do a couple different things. So you can add this concept. We said of environment secrets, that's how we were able to use that same web, app, publish profile, name, multiple different times, because once again, each of those jobs using it was in the context of a specific environment. So you go and add an environment secret name. It's the same way, you add any other secret.

C

Go and add it there once again: it's nice environment, though it's only available when this environment is actually running okay, so it's available in.

A

C

Running, but how does it actually protect our environments? How does it actually protect production or someone from using the secret by accident or on purpose, the wrong way? That's where these protection rules come into place, and this is honestly one of my favorite components of it so far. So the fact that you can now add one away timer, so you can say hey how long before you actually want to. Let someone approve this deployment to production right? Maybe you have some unit tests or selenium tests.

C

You need to run on whatever environment you're deploying to or who are the required reviewers to actually approve this workflow as well. You can add the six reviewers and for those that have used git for some time, probably familiar with this looks kind of like branch protections right for bar required viewers, uh ui and visual. I think that was very much on purpose.

C

You want to keep this a very github-centric experience, something you're used to, and the thing about this is that I like is: you can actually assign anyone a reviewer that has read access to your repository, so they don't have to have admin access per se, and I think the reason behind this is there may be some scenarios where hey I'm just a manager. I just need to have a view into what's going on in these repos. I just need read access. I don't want to be actually touching code.

C

Sometimes you don't want the person approving a code deployment to somewhere to be someone that actually wrote the code itself right. So it gives you a way to build in some responsibilities there, but you can't anyone that has access to the repo as long as it's at least read. So if I click in here and go ahead and add someone, I can go ahead and add brian cross.

C

Now I can save the protection rule. I think I see a message just popped up. How does github figure the existence of different environments? I notice it shows the different environment homepage. Can these you specify these somewhere um yeah so in terms of the different environments themselves, we're specifying them that we saw previously in our yaml file on each of the jobs we have the environment section right and github themselves, though that's a great point.

C

You see that on your homepage of your repositories and let's take a look at what that does, because that's been around for some point in time. You know deployments inside github using the deployments api for your pull request or your different things add a url and keep track of that. We kind of realized that that wasn't being used as much as we'd like to, and I think that's where using the environments and deployment mechanisms together just made a whole lot of sense.

C

So actually, let's go and take a look at that, while we check up on our action itself, all right, so it looks like our deployment is in progress. Let these finish up all right. So, while those are finishing up, let's take a look at where environments traditionally are inside github.

C

Now, if you go over here to the home page of my repo you're, probably used to seeing this on the right hand side, you got it releases, you got packages, forget packages, language support, what's the breakdown of your repo, and now you also have environments or you always had environments, but now you can use them a couple of different ways. So we click in here you can see hey. These are the different environments.

C

You have here's the activity, log of recent deployments that have occurred and it's cool, because you see this now kind of historical activity, log time frame of what's going on with your reaper. What's going on for code right, so we can see that we're actually deployed to sandbox just a few minutes ago in qa and they're, both in progress makes sense right. We triggered them at the same time to go and deploy to our environment.

C

We scroll up here we can see in our top environments. We can see hey what was actually recently deployed since I've been playing around this for a little bit, but down here where it says, show all environments. You can actually show specific environments, so, let's look at sandbox. What's the history of sandbox, been I've been playing around with this for the last couple of days right, so it's shown hey, there's an error deploying it or hey, deployed successfully recently or hey it's currently deploying.

C

So it gives you a great breakdown of what's going on in your environments, because that's really at the core of cicd, really that ends and devops experience right, making sure that we're going to the right place and we're getting the proper feedback from it, and we have a traceable journey of how we got there. Okay, whether it be this worked correctly or this worked incorrectly. We want to be able to track that down.

C

So that's why I'm really glad we're using this environment section even more so, and I think a lot of people are going to be living in here, a lot more than they have previously all right. So let's go ahead and take a look at our git of action.

C

Let's see stats of this as it's deploying all right great, so we see a couple deployments in here and it's actually going to be waiting for a prod deployment. So you can see here I actually add a wait timer to production environment. So it's going to wait for that to actually deploy, but while we're doing that, let's actually see who I added to my production environment right.

C

If you see here just going back, it says: production, the environment name, we specified in our yaml is waiting for review and it's waiting uh about a minute and a half right now before we're actually able to approve it. So I go over to my environment section and go over to my production. You can see. I had a wait time for a minute. I gave it once again the environment secret for the web publish profile, and you can see.

C

I added my colleague on the line brian cross he's gonna be acting at our tyrant boss, who will be approved every single thing before we go somewhere, but his production so I'll give him a pass, because that's probably fair that it's on his shoulders rather than mine. If something goes wrong. Okay, on the side, those secrets you saw as well: that's how they're being broken up right. Here's the repo secrets available to anyone to use really inside of github action, workflow right.

C

Anyone inside your repo, of course, but the environment secrets, they're, specified, they're environment specific once you destroy the environment, they're no longer available, and if you're building gates like we have here with our approvals only the person. Only when it's approved can you actually access and use that action itself all right. So it looks like there's actually the wait times over for it so aj and brian. If you're ready, would you mind sharing brian's screen over there and we can see if he's uh kind of to prove this? For me, hey wait.

C

A second brian you're live.

C

All right, so we see my guy brian in here.

A

uh Hear my voice.

C

Yes, sir, we do.

A

Awesome, okay, so uh yeah! So that's easy enough to do. I've got the workflow right here. I might want to actually take a look at the deployment that went to qa just to make sure that it's not completely off the chain. James is a great developer, but you never know what's happening so here we are in our qa deployment.

A

Let me go ahead and just check that out. After all, it is my neck on the line. Oh look an adorable cat photo. I love cat photos all right, so everything looks good to me. So I'm going to go ahead and approve this deployment by clicking on that item and then clicking on review pending deployments, I'm gonna say production.

A

uh This looks great, need more cat pegs, so I'm going to go ahead and approve this, and that workflow should now be on its way. Awesome.

C

I appreciate boss, man.

A

C

A

Good work, I'm gonna go back to looking at cat pics all right I'll, see you later.

C

All right, so you guys saw that experience right, so brian went in there. That was his viewpoint into the repo right saw the action run he saw. He was prompted to make a review right because you would specify this one. I couldn't do it on my own, because I did not add myself there um one one thing to specify the persons who can actually create environments inside your repos and add reviewers approvals and wait timers. Those are going to be the repo admins themselves, so repo admin, obviously the god mode position inside your repository.

C

So the repo admin is the one that can set that up right and specify hey, I'm the repo admin, but we're going to make for this. You know these workflows bunch of developers, but the actual reviewer is going to belong to just a read-only user, like brian who's able to go in there and approve my workflow even better. We can scroll down here inside this workflow run and say hey. What's the deployment review what's going on, we can see brian approve this.

C

Thank you so much for production, and this is his comment and I'll definitely take him up on that. More cat pictures for future notice- and we actually click in here and see the production environment as well and y'all can once again see that history of how production is doing and see it deployed. Okay. So, while that's a point, let's actually check out a couple different things that we were able to generate and specify using our new yaml syntax for environments.

C

So over here we saw environments, we're saying hey for sandbox here's the url. This actually comes into play now in our workflow visualization. So now it's really easy. You can just go ahead and click these links that are specified for each environment once it successfully finishes.

C

So I can click here and it's showing me my sandbox environment click in here. It's showing me my qa environment, excellent, what brian was able to double check as well. So I just love that added visibility into what's going on with your repos and who exactly is deploying where and actually how can I access and see it using that with environments on your homepage? I think just makes that experience of devops even more straightforward and kind of more synergistic of what we're working on all right.

C

So that's going to go ahead and deploy to prod it's going to do the same steps we did previously and while that's happening, let's actually pivot back and look at our azure portal, because that's where everything's living right we've worked in github so much because we got set up, we didn't have to go over there and check anything out. We'll go over here back to my azure portal inside my resource group. Here for my app service, you can see different app service slots were created for the singular app service plan.

C

We actually go to each of these as well and check on the health of them under deployment slots. Where we created multiple. You also have an option inside azure for swapping deployment slots. If you want to we're not using that in today's demo, we're just going to go and promote these environments, but this is a great concept as well. You know in case something goes bad and hey. Let's just go back to our qa or uat version. We just blew something out for some reason, so I'm going to go through and click into my sandbox.

A

C

And let's just make sure all.

A

C

Yep same link same url, so we know it's clicking and deploying to the right place. All right so over here in our yaml, what's been going on specified environment specified all the different needs it has. It says this prod. I want to make sure everything passed and that's exactly what happened in this scenario here all right and looks like our production deployment actually just finished up as well, and it's on the last step there, which is validating deployment, but that's not a requirement before I can actually access it. So, let's click this all right, great.

C

So here's my live production slot of my azure web app. The website is up and open. Let's search for my software engineering friends and get up here ivan all right see his profile is live. Everything looks good.

C

Let's see if all right and my error page is working as well and hey. I see a couple people there in the comments and hey. If anyone actually has a handle, they want me to search up, go ahead and throw it in chat again I'll give you a search. I see here we're having a couple different questions. As well putting questions for emojis yep, so emoji support is available with github actions.

C

um If there's error with using on the get it action screen, I'm actually not sure. But I'll actually point you here in a second to read me and some different resources. If you have any issues or troubleshooters general questions or feedback with github actions as well all right. So let's go over here back to my github deployment and look at what we got.

C

So, let's just recap: everything that we've seen so far right, we've seen using workflow visualization how you can see relationships between different jobs and what's depend on what and where things have to travel through and through we've seen how you can even add emoji support, but also, most importantly, environment, support to the work globalization to understand where your different environments are existing.

C

As you can see here, the keyway, my sandbox and my production urls, and we also see inside our workflow file itself, the new addition of environments and this concept that allows us to define the different scopes of what secrets belong to what specific environments as well as to find like we saw earlier where brian was able to be my required and only approver in this situation for actually allowing me to blow it into production.

C

You know a safety approval, gate, protection measurement and making sure any keys and tokens and connection strings you're planning to get a secrets inside the repo are actually protected as well, because I know that's another question: we've had over private past couple months how to secure these secrets. You know, I trust my developers, but this is our production, environment or production database. We've got to make sure that it's secure, and now you can with github environments as well all right. So we've looked at a couple things there.

C

I just want to show one kind of neat scenario of using environments and actually building this out into matrix builds both our last demo deployment here, and we don't have to see this one all the way through, at least in time, for any questions or comments and share some other things with y'all.

C

Let me go ahead and close out. Let me save these different sites and let's go ahead and use our demo three right, so this is gonna be very similar to what we used prior.

C

Push it go and trigger it, but instead of specifying just each individual environment like we did, let's actually use that same concept of matrix builds, you're, probably really familiar with inside github, and apply that to our environments as well, and it's actually kind of my nice little, I wouldn't say hack, but I think it's it's really conducive in certain situations. Right where we want to scale out. We want to make using environments or deployment slots um a kind of modular thing that we can modify in the fly so right here.

C

We're feeding it a matrix, an array right of two different environments, so sandbox and qa, and they can actually take those in when it's to find the environment itself. So you can see here, it's saying: hey: what's the name of your environment? Hey go ahead and take it from my strategy, the environment value each of these and same thing with the url right go ahead and build this url based on whatever matrix strategy. I'm.

B

C

As well as the title, this job as well, so when it does that it's going to go through here, I'm using it also for my deployment slot and it's going to go ahead and hey, go ahead and deploy to my qa and sandbox.

C

At the same time, maybe later on, someone wants to go in here and add in a uat environment or a testing environment or staging two stage, two three whatever you can just add it simply here, instead of having to copy and paste uh that entire section right for deploying to cut prod point q, a to point a sandbox every single time, just modulate that inside a matrix build once we do that, our prod deployment is just going to be reliant on that web deploy job. We defined up there to pass okay.

C

So, let's get back to my github.

C

Action go ahead and open up and we should see our latest run great and right there. You can see our deployment there it's using a matrix, build to deploy to two different environments so that same concept, we've probably been using for the last year plus of github actions. You can now use with your new environment variables too. All right, I'm gonna, go back to my pull request and show you that experience and how these updates are made in there, and while I'm doing that, I'm seeing some different questions in chat. I see one here from.

C

B

C

This year asking can you run on-premise github actions, just like gitlab runner? um I guess it depends on what you're asking there. If you're asking about not using the github, hosted cloud right for your git of action, workflow runs you totally. Can we have something called github, self-hosted runners, if you just type down to google into our docs you'll, see it and that allows you to offload and point your github repository workflow runs not to our actual cloud hosted runners, but actually to your own runners.

C

These are just machines, vms, whichever you just install a really simple lightweight package we have and it'll allow you to connect. uh Each of those workflow runs whenever they trigger. They can look for one of your machines themselves, so you can self-host these yourself, on-premises or in cloud, doesn't matter to us if you're talking about github enterprise, server right where you self host github enterprise itself, um you have actions, that's coming to that in our next release.

C

Hopefully, here in the next coming weeks, all right, seeing some more comments in chat.

C

What's your advice say: hey, okay,.

B

C

From uh is that your toga? What's your advice for legacy.net developers who are not really aware of these devops things? Well, you know, that's that's a great question and honestly there's so much going on all the time. I'm pretty sure people in chat can agree to that right, staying up to date, but everything can just be uh so much to try and do, but I definitely recommend resources like this here on linkedin. I'm not sure exactly how many, but do you know?

C

Linkedin learn has a couple free resources available and if you have a subscription even better plenty of great courses, I've enjoyed as well as our youtube channel. You know get up youtube. You can find a bunch of different content about us doing these deployments these videos, as well as follow us here on our twitch and linkedin channel, as we're doing these demos every single friday uh to review different content and material inside it, but I would say in general, just kind of get started. um You know it's! It's never too late.

C

I think in my book and you have to hit the ground running at some point. No one can know.

B

A

C

Means so just starting, I think, is the first step and just don't be intimidated. There's plenty of great resources out there so reach out to your network and to the community. We have on cube.com all right. So let's look at this pull request real, quick and then, if there are any additional questions, we can have some time too, I'm seeing some people in chat also mentioning some resources. That's great all right, so we can see here that this deployment section is now available in a port class, and this has been available before.

C

But I just like how actions ties is in very neatly, and now those environments it's applying to those are the same ones, we're actually setting up right either manually or whenever you run your github action, where it's specified, they'll also create them for you. So we can see here it's pointing out. Hey here's, your production, your qa! You can go and view the deployment from your pull request, awesome for other people working on it, or maybe just project managers or business analysts who need to go.

C

Take a look and, of course, your status check, ua ui that you're aware of showing you what the status of everything is and how everything's going all right. So everyone looks like we're coming up to the top of the hour here. I think a couple people are actually playing over the website, so I appreciate that go ahead and do a search. I would warn you, though there is a limit of I think about 30 or so searches within an hour, because I'm not using an access token or anything.

C

So it's just using the the free open api to search different users, but hey feel free to go. Do that this repo is out there and available for you all to take a look at fork, pull requests or anything like that. I have a bunch of different references in the readme. One thing I do know do not use this for production. Employment actually is a known vulnerability with one of the components.

C

Sadly, it's a component being used by another component love open source, sometimes in that situation, but hopefully it gets resolved soon, but once again, it's just for demo purposes. Please not use in production some steps here how to run it locally test it as well as additional reference material right from our documentation on github microsoft. How I actually built this app. There was a really simple tutorial out. There followed it's great as well as some different youtube videos on codespaces and github actions.

C

Of course, if you want to take a look at this content, some more if you want to participate in discussion, feel free to open an issue or discussions right in here or visit our community page on support community with github, and we have a code to cloud section where you can ask questions, start threads or just provide feedback. Our product team is really receptive. We want to know how do you want to see this product and solution grow? Do you want to have a minimum required amount of reviewers?

C

Do you want to maybe have something additional to just wait, timers or required reviewers? Do you want environments to be able to scale differently or different types of environments or sub environments whatever it is you're thinking about? Let us know, because we love that from the users and honestly, if you're, not using this, there's no point in us developing it. In my perspective, I see someone here said: can I post a link in the chat description?

C

uh I cannot. Sadly, I don't have access to it right now, but this recording is up on github and if you just search this or add this url select right here, my name you'll find me uh in just a few seconds all right. So with that guys, I think just a few last announcements for us here.

C

This is our github demo day, and uh we do this uh trying to, I think, close to every single friday and this month we have a lot of great things coming along with my buddy, mr brian cross, the cat fiend over there he's going to be doing a demo here, and I think two or three weeks, brian and one of my other colleagues, mr kevin allwell and jonathan they're, going to be demoing some of our universe, ships for code scanning secret scanning get events in the odd log.

C

So a lot of security-minded things next friday that I hope you check out as well. Alright, everyone with that, I think we are wrapping up demo day, aj.

B

C

You, sir, before close.

B

No, I I think that's been a really packed demo like uh definitely saw a lot of comments with folks getting really useful information out of it. I mean it's a ton to cover, uh obviously- and uh you know, as folks dig in I'm sure more questions will pop up. So in terms of that like if they have questions once the stream is done like, where should folks go.

C

Yeah, that's great, that's a great question right. There so, like I said, feel free to reach out in this repository. If you want to start a discussion, thread, awesome new feature and give discussions available for public repos feel free to start in here. If any questions, pull requests are always welcome, as well as our community post here, where you can ask additional questions, follow up or provide feedback.

C

If there's anyone here interested in using this for github enterprise for their different companies feel free to reach out our good of enterprise sales team I'll, provide you the link as well here, and we can definitely talk to you all about pricing or what features you want to use. Or what do you get with the enterprise solution itself as well? So definitely reach us out, and you can see more information on that on give.com enterprise.

B

All right cool thanks james see you soon thanks.

C

B