CI with drone.io and your own images

I’ve been evaluating drone.io yesterday and I’m quite impressed with the integration and simplicity. You can use drone as a SAAS or install it on your own hardware. It’s really easy. Drone comes with batteries included. After setting up OAuth with your repository system (e.g. Gitlab in our case), you are good to go. You can just select the project from a list and then you are asked to place a .drone.yml in the project root - which could look like this:

image: brejoc/trusty
script:
  - make
  - make test
notify:
  email:
    recipients:
      - me@example.com

With every commit drone now uses the docker image brejoc/trusty to build and test the project like defined in the script section. In theory you are able to use any docker image out there. But there seems to be a caveat. You can use any docker image with Git installed. Quite a number of images don’t ship Git preinstalled, so you’ll have to take care of that yourself.

Let’s use the Ubuntu image of trusty for example:

FROM ubuntu:14.04
MAINTAINER Peter Parker "me@example.com"
RUN apt-get -y update
RUN apt-get install -y git
CMD []

This Dockerfile is enough to get an image with Git and it’s enough to make drone happy.
Now you’ve got two choices. You can either put this up on Docker Hub so that you can pull the image from anywhere you want, or you can just build the image on your build server like this: docker build -t 'brejoc/trusty' .

Of couse you should use an other tag. ;) Both ways work flawlessly and drone doesn’t care where the image came from.

drone is open source and licensed unter the Apache License Version 2.0. For public projects the SAAS offering is free. There are also payed plans available which include more projects or increased concurrent builds. The website doesn’t mention if it is possible to support the project apart from the SAAS plans.