Tekton tops up Pipelines to beta level

Tekton tops up Pipelines to beta level

Tekton Pipelines has shifted into beta, meaning the open source CD project is now looking for more contributors and testers.

Tekton Pipeline is the core component of the Tekton project, which is overseen by the Continuous Delivery Foundation, and is pitched to “configure and run continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines within a Kubernetes cluster.” It originated in Knative Build.

The project team said the beta means “most Tekton Pipelines CRDs (Custom Resource Definition) are now at beta level. This means overall beta level stability can be relied on.” However, other components, including Tekton Triggers, Dashboard, Pipelines CLI and more, “are still alpha and may continue to evolve from release to release”.

The project’s GitHub page has flagged up changes including a new API version, v1beta1, improved LimitRange support, and the ability to share data between tasks.

The move to beta does mean a few deprecations and breaking changes. The former includes PipelineResources not moving to beta. The Tekton team said the PipelineResources feature had been “a source of some contention” and “we do not plan to promote PipelineResources into Beta and will instead provide a documented migration path for users that does not use the type at all.”

The project also flagged up planned changes regarding the $HOME env var and workingDir of Steps. Currently, Tekton overwrites these in a Step’s container, which can cause problems. The beta sees a new ConfigMap, named feature-flags, that allows users to disable this, and support for the overwriting will eventually be removed completely. The minimum required version of Kubernetes is now 1.15.

Tekton is one of four “graduated” projects under the CDF banner, along with Jenkins, Jenkins X and Spinnaker.