Setting Up and Using Concourse CI on Ubuntu 16.04

Continuous integration, delivery, and deployment are strategies designed to help increase the velocity of development and the release of well-tested, usable products. In this guide, we will compare some popular free and open-source continuous integration, delivery, and deployment servers designed to make collaborative software development easier. We will take a look at Jenkins, GitLab CI, Buildbot, Drone, and Concourse.

Concourse CI is a modern, scalable continuous integration system designed to automate testing pipelines with a composable, declarative syntax. In this tutorial, we will demonstrate how to install Concourse CI on an Ubuntu 16.04 server. We will configure a PostgreSQL database to use as the backend, download and install the Concourse binaries, and then configure the web and worker processes that allow us to build and execute continuous integration pipelines.

In this guide, we will secure the Concourse CI interfaces by setting up a TLS/SSL reverse proxy with Nginx. While Concourse can be configured to use SSL natively, a reverse proxy provides more flexibility for future scaling and access to a more robust feature set.

In this guide, we will demonstrate how to use Concourse to automatically run your project’s test suite when new changes are committed to the repository. To demonstrate, we will configure a continuous integration pipeline for a “hello world” application written with Hapi.js, a Node.js web framework.