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The Harness UI as well as the underlying Harness API have received critical acclaim from customers for their developer-first UX. Additionally, the Harness Terraform Provider has also become extremely popular among experienced Harness users for automating large-scale onboarding of their applications onto Harness. However, all three interfaces create a certain amount of friction when it comes to learning of Harness concepts for users new to the Harness Platform and its multiple modules. Following are some examples:
To solve the above new user learning challenge, we are pleased to announce the public preview launch of the new Harness CLI. As the name suggests, it is a command-line interface (CLI) designed for interacting with Harness and it is fully open source under the MIT license. It lowers the barrier to entry and offers a simple and intuitive way for everyone to access their Harness resources. For developers, it offers the best of both worlds, which is developer-friendly automation while also remaining within the developer’s IDE or familiar environment.
Thanks to Nicholas Lotz, our new Developer Advocate, you can get started here by simply watching a video.
You can use the CLI for both push-based CD pipeline deployments as well as pull-based GitOps deployments. For this blog post, you will see how to get a GitOps deployment going with the CLI. This tutorial is also available in the Harness Docs.
You should have access to a Kubernetes cluster. For simplicity, this post will use minikube that is running on the same local machine as the Harness CLI (you will download and install later in this tutorial).
You will need a Harness SaaS account to complete this tutorial. It is free to sign up if you don’t have one already. After signing up, you will get access to the free tiers of many Harness modules including the Harness CD & GitOps module used in this tutorial.
Harness GitOps Agent is a worker process that runs in your Kubernetes cluster and performs all the GitOps tasks you request in Harness. It makes secure, outbound connections to Harness Platform so that you don’t have to open up ports to the Internet from your Kubernetes cluster.
First you have to download the agent from the Harness UI. Click on GitOps → Settings → GitOps Agents → New GitOps Agent. Let’s assume you do not have any existing Argo CD instance running in our Kubernetes cluster, so you will choose the NO option to the question “Do you have any existing Argo CD instances?” and click Start. In the next screen, enter mygitopsagent for the agent name and mygitopsns for the agent namespace.
Click Continue and then download the gitops agent helm chart (with Argo CD included) in the form of a tgz file.
Now that you have downloaded the agent, it is time to install it on our Kubernetes cluster which in this case is the local minikube. You will first create the namespace where you will install the agent. And then you will install the agent there using the helm install command.
You can check the status of the installation using the command below. Notice that your installation also includes an instance of Argo CD since that’s the option you chose during the agent download from Harness UI in the previous step.
Set the environment variable AGENT_NAME to mygitopsagent so that we can use it during the later steps.
Download the CLI as shown below. Make sure to use the binary specific to your operating system.
Now login to your Harness account using the CLI using your account id and your API key. Account id is available on every Harness URL as well as your Account Settings page. Create a new personal API key from your User Profile page using these instructions.
After successful login, the API key and account id are stored locally on your machine and used by CLI for subsequent operations.
Fork https://github.com/harness-community/harnesscd-example-apps into your own GitHub account and then clone it to your local machine.
Now, you will create the Harness GitOps repository, cluster and application using the sample YAMLs provided for the guestbook app. Before that, you need to make the following edits to the YAMLs.
On the Harness UI, go to GitOps → Applications. Click on the gitops-application tile and then click SYNC at the top right to initiate a sync between the state of your GitOps application in Git and the state of your Kubernetes cluster. Since the application did not exist in Kubernetes till now, the application will get deployed now. You can check the status using the command below as well as from the UI.
Go to App Details in the gitops-application and scroll down to Sync Options & Policy. Toggle it to turn on Automated sync. Any changes to your Git repo will now be automatically synced to your Kubernetes cluster.
Using the CLI to simplify Harness CD & GitOps onboarding for new users is just the start. We plan to enhance the CLI to cover all Harness resources that are managed by the Harness API. This will bring the same simple onboarding experience to other Harness modules as well. Meanwhile, your feedback goes a long way in helping us prioritize the most important use cases, especially as we aim to get the CLI to a GA stage over the next few months. You are welcome to file GitHub issues, ask questions on our Community Slack or send in contributions via Pull Requests.
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Learn intelligent software delivery at your own pace. Step-by-step tutorials, videos, and reference docs to help you deliver customer happiness.
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Learn intelligent software delivery at your own pace. Step-by-step tutorials, videos, and reference docs to help you deliver customer happiness.
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