Create your delivery pipeline and targets

This page describes how to create the delivery pipeline and targets that describe where and how Cloud Deploy will deploy your application. See Configuration file schema for a description of the YAML file structure for delivery pipelines and targets.

About the delivery pipeline and targets

Your delivery pipeline describes a progression of deployment targets. You can define those targets in the same file as the delivery pipeline or in one or more separate files.

After you create the delivery pipeline and target definition file or files, you run gcloud deploy apply against each of those files to register them as Cloud Deploy resources.

Define the delivery pipeline and targets

The structure of the delivery pipeline and target configuration files is described here.

You can call this file anything you want. By convention, a delivery pipeline config that includes target definitions is called clouddeploy.yaml, and one that instead references targets defined in one or more separate files is named delivery-pipeline.yaml.

The target can point to GKE, Anthos, or Cloud Run. Within a delivery pipeline, all targets must reference the same runtime type (all GKE, or all Anthos, for example).

Create a delivery pipeline and targets from the Google Cloud console

You can use the Google Cloud console to create a new delivery pipeline and target or targets. This is useful for trying out Cloud Deploy, but is not suitable for production workloads. (You can also use the Google Cloud console to create a release.)

To create the delivery pipeline:

  1. From the Delivery pipelines page, click Create.

  2. Provide a name (or keep the default) and, optionally, a description.

  3. Select your region.

  4. Choose your runtime environment.

    For GKE, choose Google Kubernetes Engine, or select Cloud Run if that's the runtime you're deploying to.

  5. Under New target, provide a name (or keep the default).

  6. If you want to require approval on this target, select the Require approval for rollouts checkbox.

  7. If you're going to use a canary deployment strategy on this target, select the Enable canary checkbox.

  8. Click Done.

  9. Click Add target and follow these steps for each additional target you want to create.

  10. When you have all your targets, click Create to create the delivery pipeline and target resources.

Register the delivery pipeline and targets

If you created your pipeline and targets using the Google Cloud console, you don't need to do this.

To register your delivery pipeline with Cloud Deploy, you run gcloud deploy apply once for each separate definition file. That is, if you define three targets in three files, you would run the command four times—once for the delivery pipeline, and once for each target.

The following command registers a delivery pipeline with its targets defined in the same file.

gcloud deploy apply --file=PIPELINE_CONFIG \
                    --region=LOCATION \
                    --project=PROJECT

You now have a delivery pipeline that can manage deployment of your releases, and target resources that can be used by any delivery pipeline in the same project and region.

A single-file example

The command in this example registers a delivery pipeline and targets that are all defined in the same file:

gcloud deploy apply --file=clouddeploy.yaml --region=us-central1

An example using separate files

For this example, there are three targets defined in three separate files, so you run four commands:

gcloud deploy apply --file=delivery-pipeline.yaml --region=us-central1 && \
gcloud deploy apply --file=target_dev.yaml --region=us-central1 && \
gcloud deploy apply --file=target_staging.yaml --region=us-central1 && \
gcloud deploy apply --file=target_prod.yaml --region=us-central1

The --region flag is required unless you've set a default (using gcloud config set deploy/region [REGION]). The region must be the same for the delivery pipeline and all targets that pipeline references.

Create the delivery pipeline and targets using Terraform

You can also use the Google Cloud Terraform provider to create delivery pipeline and target resources.

The Google Cloud beta Terraform provider may include support for Cloud Deploy features in Preview.

Edit existing pipelines and targets

You can later edit any delivery pipeline or target config and run gcloud deploy apply to update the pipeline or target resource. But those changes do not affect any existing releases, as they are managed by the original delivery pipeline.

Require manual approval for a deployment

To require manual approval for a given target, include the following property on the target definition:

requireApproval: true

The default is false. If you omit this property from the delivery-pipeline config, or provide no value for it, deploying to this target doesn't require approval. (But the caller trying to promote to the target still needs the clouddeploy.rollouts.create IAM permission.)

You can even require manual approval on the first target. When a release is created, using the CLI, for the first target, the rollout is created automatically. If approval is required, Cloud Deploy creates the rollout, but in a pending-release state until approval is given.

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