Automation Tools

This section contains the description of the automation tools used in the United Manufacturing Hub project.

Automation tools are an essential part of the United Manufacturing Hub project. They automate the building and testing of the project’s code, ensuring that it remains of high quality and stays reliable.

We rely on GitHub Actions for running the pipelines, which are defined in the .github/workflows directory of the project’s repository.

Here’s a brief overview of each workflow:

Build Docker Images

This pipeline builds and pushes all the Docker images for the project, tagging them using the branch name or the git tag. This way there is always a tagged version for the latest release of the UMH, as well as specific version for each branch to use for testing.

It runs on push events only when relevant files have been changed, such as the Dockerfiles or the source code.

GitGuardian Scan

This pipeline scans the code for security vulnerabilities, such as exposed secrets.

It runs on both push and pull request events.

Test Deployment

Small deployment test

(deactivated for now as they were flaky. will be replaced in the future with E2E tests)

This pipeline group verifies that the current changes can be successfully installed and that data flows correctly. There are two pipelines: a “tiny” version with the minimum amount of services needed to run the stack, and a “full” version with as many services as possible.

Each pipeline has two jobs. The first job installs the stacks with the current changes, and the second job tries to upgrade from the latest stable version to the current changes.

A test is run in each workflow to verify that simulated data flows through MQTT, NodeRed, Kafka, and TimescaleDB. In the full version, an additional test for sensorconnect is run, using a mocked sensor to verify the data flow.

It runs on pull request events when the Helm configuration or the source code changes.

Full E2E test

On every push to main and staging, an E2E test is executed. More information about this can be found on Github