crane

A GitLab CI ready image to upgrade services in Rancher. See the whole story on our blog at code.kiwi.com!

Usage

1. Deploy your application on Rancher manually, with an image tagged with a git reference (our recommendation is to use the commit SHA, but you can also use git tags.)

2. Get a Rancher Environment API key and add the API keypair as secret variables in the project, named RANCHER_ACCESS_KEY and RANCHER_SECRET_KEY.

3. Also add RANCHER_URL and RANCHER_ENV_ID, preferably in secret variables, or in .gitlab-ci.yml. (In the example URL https://rancher.example.com/env/1a81/apps/stacks/1e551/services/1s1456/containers the environment ID is 1a81. This ID always starts with 1a.)

4. Add something like this to your .gitlab-ci.yml:

   stages:
     # [...]
     - deploy
   
   deploy-production:
     stage: deploy
     image: kiwicom/crane:3.2.1
     script:
       - crane --stack my-app --service api --service worker
     environment:
       name: production
       url: https://my-app.example.com/
     when: manual
   

Settings

Integrations & Extensions

Slack

When --slack-token is set, crane can post an announcement to --slack-channel with details about the ongoing deployment. You can use --slack-link to add useful URLs to this announcements such as Datadog dashboards, Sentry issues, or the project repository. You can set --slack-channel multiple times; all channels will have the same annnouncement posted to them. If you're setting the channel names via the environment variable, separate them with a space.

Sentry

With --sentry-webhook, crane can post release details to Sentry. Release tracking is useful to provide additional context to errors tracked in Sentry.

Datadog

If you set an API key with --datadog-key, Crane will post successful and failed releases to your Datadog event feed. These events can then be marked on charts and displayed on dashboards.

Generic webhooks

With the --webhook-url option, you can specify URLs that crane will send release info to, in its own format. One use for this is for analytics; if somebody sets up a listener for these events, they'll have the data needed to identify correlations between releases and changes in user behavior or sales numbers.