Creating and Publishing Custom Orbs - CircleCI Tutorial

Introduction

Custom orbs in CircleCI allow you to encapsulate and share reusable configurations across your projects and organizations. By creating and publishing custom orbs, you can promote consistency, simplify pipeline configurations, and enhance collaboration within your development teams. This tutorial will guide you through the steps of creating and publishing your own custom orbs in CircleCI.

Example

Let's consider an example where we create and publish a custom orb for deploying applications to AWS Elastic Beanstalk:


    version: 2.1

    orbs:

      my-aws-beanstalk: myorg/aws-beanstalk@1.0.0

    jobs:

      deploy:

        executor: my-aws-beanstalk/default

        steps:

          - checkout

          - my-aws-beanstalk/deploy-application

          - my-aws-beanstalk/clean-up

Creating and Publishing Custom Orbs

To create and publish custom orbs in CircleCI, follow these steps:

1. Define your orb

Create a new orb by defining its commands, jobs, and executors in a YAML file. This file specifies the functionality and configurations encapsulated by the orb.

For example, to create a custom orb for AWS Elastic Beanstalk deployment, you can define the deployment steps, environment variables, and other relevant configurations.

2. Validate and test the orb

Use the CircleCI CLI or the online Orb Development Kit (ODK) to validate and test your orb. This ensures that your orb is syntactically correct and functions as expected.

Run commands such as circleci orb validate and circleci orb publish to validate and test your orb locally before publishing.

3. Publish the orb

Publish your custom orb to the Orb Registry, making it available for use across projects and organizations. The Orb Registry is a centralized repository of orbs maintained by CircleCI.

Use the circleci orb publish command, providing the necessary authentication and version information, to publish your orb to the registry.

Common Mistakes

Not following the orb naming conventions and conventions for orb directory structure
Missing or incorrect validation and testing of the orb before publishing
Not documenting the orb's functionality and usage for users

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Can I use custom orbs within my organization only?

Yes, you can restrict the usage of your custom orbs to your organization by specifying the appropriate visibility settings during the publishing process. This ensures that the orbs are only available within your organization's CircleCI environment.
Can I version my custom orbs?

Yes, you can version your custom orbs to maintain different versions and track changes over time. Each published version of an orb is immutable and can be referenced in your pipeline configurations.
Can I update a published orb?

Yes, you can update a published orb by incrementing its version number and publishing the updated orb. This allows you to introduce new features, bug fixes, or improvements to your custom orbs.

Summary

In this tutorial, you learned how to create and publish custom orbs in CircleCI to encapsulate reusable configurations and share them across projects and organizations. By defining your orbs, validating and testing them, and publishing them to the Orb Registry, you can promote consistency, simplify pipeline configurations, and enhance collaboration within your development teams. Avoid common mistakes, document your orbs, and version them to effectively leverage custom orbs in your CI/CD workflows.