Concourse and FLY CLI – A Quick Overview

Rashmi

2 years ago

Table of contents

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Concourse

Concourse is a pipeline-based continuous thing-doer. It is based on the simple mechanics of resources, tasks, and jobs, it presents a generic approach to automation that makes it ideal for CI/CD.

Quick Installation

Download the docker-compose file

For the concourse backend, it includes a concourse server and a PostgreSQL database.

wget https://concourse-ci.org/docker-compose.yml

Run that docker-compose file

docker-compose up -d

It will be running at localhost:8080. As a test/test, you can log in with the username/password.

fly CLI

The Fly tool provides a command-line interface to Concourse. All the configuration and administration are done using the fly CLI tool.

We need to download fly CLI from the web UI and install it (localhost:8080). You can download the CLI for Windows, Mac, and Linux from the top welcome page.

After downloading the CLI tool, we must grant it execute permission and copy it to the /usr/bin/ directory.

chmod +x ~/Downloads/fly
sudo install ~/Downloads/fly /usr/local/bin

You can check for the availability of the executable by typing:

fly --version

Authenticating with the Concourse Server

fly -t tutorial login -c http://localhost:8080 -u test -p test

The login command performs two functions: it authenticates with a given endpoint and saves the result under a more convenient name. The name and token are saved in the file /.flyrc.

Basics commands for fly CLI

fly targets

This will display the name, URL, and expiration date of each target.

fly targets

fly status

This will inform you if the token has expired.

fly -t tutorial status

fly userinfo

To see what user you’re logged in as, which teams you’re currently authenticated to, and which roles you have within each team.

fly -t tutorial userinfo

fly teams

This will list all the teams, users, and groups.

fly -t tutorial teams

fly logout

To clear out your token for a given target.

fly -t tutorial logout

To clear out your token for all targets.

fly logout -a

fly sync

To ensure that you are running the most recent version that is compatible with the Concourse you are targeting, we provide a command called sync that will update your local fly.