What is Gruntwork Pipelines?
This documentation relates to the latest version of Gruntwork Pipelines released in May 2024.
If you are using the older version of Gruntwork Pipelines that includes the infrastructure-pipelines repository, click here to learn more about the deprecation of that version.
Gruntwork Pipelines is designed to enable your organization to deploy infrastructure changes to cloud environments with control and confidence.
Having worked with hundreds of organizations to help them improve DevOps, we've discovered two truths about making changes to infrastructure:
- Teams want to control exactly how infrastructure change gets rolled out
- Deploying infrastructure changes is scary!
To address your need for control, we've designed Gruntwork Pipelines to use configuration as code, where you use HCL (a popular alternative to JSON and YAML) to set configuration values that apply to your entire git repo, to just one environment, or to a single deployable unit of infrastructure. For example, you can specify a unique AWS authentication strategy for each deployable unit of infrastructure, one per environment, or a single strategy for the entire git repo.
To address your need for assurance that an infrastructure change is safe to apply, we include a thoughtfully formatted terragrunt plan user experience, and the ability to customize Gruntwork Pipelines to support arbitrary steps that your organization needs to establish confidence in a deployment. Building assurance also factors heavily into our roadmap.
Built for Terragrunt
Gruntwork is the creator and maintainer of Terragrunt, so we built Gruntwork Pipelines with first-class support for the full Terragrunt lifecycle, including:
terragrunt planterragrunt applyterragrunt destroyterragrunt run-all
We also make updates directly to Terragrunt to support the functionality we want to see in Gruntwork Pipelines.
Runs directly in GitHub Actions
Gruntwork Pipelines runs directly in GitHub Actions, and uses a pull request-centric workflow. This means that all information about a proposed infrastructure change is added as comments to the applicable pull request, and that you apply the infrastructure change by interacting with the pull request.
Gruntwork does not need access to your secrets or state files, as these remain in GitHub Actions. At the same time, we continually push new features and updates to Gruntwork Pipelines so that your user experience, security posture, and feature set continues to improve with no effort on your part.
Common Terms
Gruntwork Pipelines uses specific terminology to describe code changes and operations that occur as a result of changes. This section will familiarize you with the terminology used throughout the Gruntwork Pipelines documentation.
Infrastructure change
When you edit any Infrastructure As Code (IAC) that needs to be "applied" to your cloud account (e.g. AWS or GCP), you are making an infrastructure change. We sometime call these an "infra-change" for short.
Infra-changes can involve updates to OpenTofu/Terraform or Terragrunt code, or any other type of file that represents a desired state of your infrastructure and that needs to be somehow applied. A classic example is changing some variables on an instance of an OpenTofu module. Gruntwork Pipelines assumes that infra-changes are committed via git, usually by first opening a pull request. When you open a pull request, you are essentially "proposing" an infra-change.
Infrastructure change set
Sometimes users create a pull request that changes more than one file at a time. And sometimes a change to a single file affects how multiple other files will be "applied" to your live cloud account. For example, many users of Terragrunt use a pattern known as "envcommon" as a way to specify a default set of values for modules.
When more than one infra-change is made at a time, we call this an infrastructure-change set.
Pipelines actions
When a user proposes to make an infra-change by opening a pull request, we want to take some kind of "action" in response to that proposed-change. For example, we may want to run a terragrunt plan and estimate the cost of applying this Terragrunt plan. We call these pipelines actions.
Gruntwork is responsible for adding support for a growing library of Pipelines Actions and we will continue to add more over time.