My review of Bitbucket pipeline beta

So you would like to build, test and deploy your code continuously? but don’t want to install and configure your local instances of Jenkins or Bamboo (Check out our thoughts on both tools), you don’t have to anymore. Atlassian is replacing its Bamboo on Cloud offering with Bitbucket pipeline. This offering is for small and medium sized businesses.

I recently signed up for the Bitbucket pipeline beta program at bitbucket.org and got accepted a month ago. Read on for my sum up of this new Atlassian offering

Key features:

1. A continuous integration (CI) and Continuous deployment (CD) engine is ready for use on any of your git or mercurial repositories by just adding a bitbucket-pipeline.yml file in your project root. You pipeline is triggered as soon a change is pushed to any or a selected branch. See the below simple example of the bitbucket-pipeline.yml file.

   image: node:5.11.0
   pipelines:
   ? default:
   ??? - step:
   ??????? script:
   ????????? - echo "This script runs on all branches that don't have any specific pipeline assigned in 'branches'."
   ? branches:
   ??? master:
   ????? - step:
   ????????? script:
   ??????????? - echo "This script runs only on commit to the master branch."
   ??? feature/*:
   ????? - step:
   ????????? image: java:openjdk-9 # This step uses its own image
   ????????? script:
   ??????????? - echo "This script runs only on commit to branches with names that match the feature/* pattern."

2. Employs docker images to build, test and deploy your code. Out of the box has images for the following languages ?
3. Support for builds in any docker image. You can build your own docker image with your language support and build it using the pipeline. Docker images for additional languages below are available at? docker hub.
   • Golang
   • Haskell
   • Perl
   • Clojure
   • Erlang

   I needed a docker image that has the atlassian sdk that is built on top of maven to build my sample atlassian plugin. I used a docker image built by Translucent. You can get it at the?docker hub. Take a look at my bitbucket.pipeline.yml file below or get the entire source at github

   image: translucent/atlassian-plugin-sdk
   
   pipelines:
     default:
       - step:
           script: # Modify the commands below to build your repository.
             - cd adminUI
             - pwd
             - atlas-version
             - atlas-mvn clean install

4. Environment variables allow passing security parameters and other configurable variables.? You can write scripts in the yml file or invoke nested scripts from your project folder.
5. Community support is increasing and well documented
6. Several integration images are available to test, monitor and deploy your code.

The appeal:

• Simple to configure and you can start building with a flip of a switch
• Simple architecture and ability to invoke parallel scripts and trigger different docker images delivers great scalability
• Industry supported docker images and ability to create your own images makes this offering flexible

?Limitations:

• No Email and HipChat notifications
• No Jira integration
• Build speeds and concurrency is limited

The product is still in Beta, but will appeal to most due to its simplicity and integrated seamlessly into the Bitbucket UI.

Feel free to share your experience