Cirrus CLI
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Cirrus CLI is a tool for running containerized tasks reproducibly in any environment. Most commonly, Cirrus tasks are used as part of continuous integration workflows
but can also be used as part of local development process as a hermetic replacement of helper scripts/Makefiles.
Cirrus CLI runs your tasks locally the same way they are executed in CI or on your colleague's machine. Immutability of containers ensures
the tasks will be executed the same way years from now regardless what versions of packages you'll have locally.
![Cirrus CLI Demo](https://github.com/cirruslabs/cirrus-cli/raw/v0.108.5/images/cirrus-cli-demo.gif)
Installation
Usage
Cirrus CLI reuses the same YAML configuration format as Cirrus CI which allows to
reuse a large list of examples created by Cirrus CI community.
Note: Cirrus CLI can be used in any environment that has Docker or Podman installed. It can be your laptop or any CI system you already have
like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Travis CI, etc. With Cirrus CLI it's no longer a requirement to use Cirrus CI in order to benefit from Cirrus
configuration format that we (Cirrus Labs) have crafted for so long and really proud of.
Here is an example of .cirrus.yml
configuration file for testing a Go application with several Go versions:
task:
env:
matrix:
VERSION: 1.15
VERSION: 1.14
name: Tests (Go $VERSION)
container:
image: golang:$VERSION
modules_cache:
fingerprint_script: cat go.sum
folder: $GOPATH/pkg/mod
get_script: go get ./...
build_script: go build ./...
test_script: go test ./...
Running Cirrus Tasks
To run Cirrus tasks, simply switch to a directory where the .cirrus.yml
is located and run:
cirrus run
By default, working directory will be rsync
ed into a container while respecting .gitignore
configuration. This makes sure Cirrus Tasks are executed from a clean state only with source code
changes.
In case rsync
-ing the whole working directory is too costly, you can pass a --dirty
flag which
will result in all operations being done against the actual working directory (and not it's rsync
ed copy):
cirrus run --dirty Lint
Since most linters and code-analysis tools are read-only by their nature there is no need in extra precautions and
the potentially costly rsync
-ing can be safely avoided.
It is also possible to run a particular task by name:
cirrus run "Tests (Go 1.15)"
Or pass some extra environment variables with -e
flag:
cirrus run -e CIRRUS_TAG="test-release" Release
Note: Cirrus CLI only supports Linux container
and
macos_instance
VMs at the moment. Linux containers support the
Dockerfile as a CI environment feature.
Validating Cirrus Configuration
To validate a Cirrus configuration, simply switch to a directory where the .cirrus.yml
is located and run:
cirrus validate
Caching
By default, Cirrus CLI stores blob artifacts produced by the cache instruction
in the user-specific cached data folder. Similar to Cirrus Cloud
the CLI can use a caching HTTP server for more efficient sharing of cached artifacts between tasks executed on different physical hosts.
Caching HTTP server should support a single /<key>
REST endpoint with PUT
, GET
and HEAD
methods available for
uploading, downloading and checking availability of a cached artifact under <key>
key respectively. There are reference
implementations of such HTTP servers for Google Cloud Storage and
AWS S3 and Azure's Blob Storage.
To start using your own HTTP caching server simply pass it's hostname as CIRRUS_HTTP_CACHE_HOST
to run
command:
cirrus run --environment CIRRUS_HTTP_CACHE_HOST=http-cache-host.internal:8080
Security
Cirrus CLI aims to run in different environments, but in some environments we choose to provide more usability at the cost of some security trade-offs:
- SELinux
- both the task container and the helper container (that copies the project directory into a per-task container volume using
rsync
) run unconfined
Please open an issue if your use-case requires a different approach.
FAQ
What is the relationship between Cirrus CI and Cirrus CLI?
Cirrus CI was released in the early 2018 with an idea
to bring some innovation to CI space. A lot of things have changed in CI-as-a-service space since then but Cirrus CI
pioneered many ideas in CI-as-a-service space including per-second billing and support for Linux, Windows and macOS all together.
Over the past two and a half years we heard only positive feedback about Cirrus CI's YAML configuration format. Users liked how
concise their configuration looked and that it was easy to reason about.
Another feedback we heard from users was that it's hard to migrate from one CI to another. There is a need to rewrite CI configurations
from one format into another that basically still locks into another vendor.
And now in 2020 with Cirrus CLI we are trying to solve the "vendor lock" problem by popularizing Cirrus configuration format
and building community around it. Stay tuned for the upcoming option to use Starlark templates instead of YAML!
Think of Cirrus CLI as an executor of Cirrus Tasks on a single machine only in Docker containers for simple CI scenarious.
And Cirrus CI as an option for more specific cases where Cirrus Tasks can be executed in containers and VMs using
a variety of supported compute services or
using a managed infrastructure with per-second billing.