Use Drone plugins

Drone plugins are Docker containers that perform predefined tasks.

Drone plugins are Docker containers that perform predefined tasks. You can use the Plugin step to run plugins from the Drone Plugins Marketplace in your Harness CI pipelines. You can also write your own custom plugins. For more information about plugins, go to Explore plugins.

About Drone

Drone was acquired by Harness in 2020 and is part of Harness CI.

For more information on the acquisition of Drone, go to the following blog posts:

Add a plugin to a Harness CI pipeline

To demonstrate how to add a Drone plugin to a Harness CI pipeline, these steps use the Download plugin as an example. This plugin downloads an archive to the stage workspace.

Add the Plugin step to the Build stage of your CI pipeline, and configure the settings as follows:

Name: Enter a name for the step.
Description: Optional description.
Container Registry: Select a Docker connector.
Image: Enter the plugin's Docker image, such as plugins/download. You can find this on the plugin's page on the Drone Plugins Marketplace.
Settings: Enter key-value pairs representing plugin settings. You can find this on the plugin's page on the Drone Plugins Marketplace or in the plugin's README.
For information about other settings, go to the Plugin step settings reference.

The following screenshot shows a Plugin step configured for the Download plugin.

Add the Plugin step to your CI stage with the following settings:

type: Plugin
name: A name for the step
connectorRef: The ID of a Docker connector.
image: The plugin's Docker image, such as plugins/download. You can find this on the plugin's page on the Drone Plugins Marketplace.
settings: A mapping of key-value pairs representing plugin settings. You can find this on the plugin's page on the Drone Plugins Marketplace or in the plugin's README.
For information about other settings, go to the Plugin step settings reference.

The following examples show the YAML definition for a Plugin step configured for the Download plugin.

This example downloads the Drone Linux amd64 tarball. It provides a username and password for authentication to GitHub.

              - step:
                  type: Plugin
                  name: drone plugin
                  identifier: drone_plugin
                  spec:
                    connectorRef: account.docker
                    image: plugins/download
                    settings:
                      source: https://github.com/drone/drone-cli/releases/download/v0.8.5/drone_linux_amd64.tar.gz ## Target to download
                      username: my-username ## Username for authentication to the source
                      password: `<+secrets.getValue("mygithubpersonalaccesstoken")>` ## Password for authentication to the source

This example downloads the AWS CLI for Linux and saves it to the default stage workspace directory under the name awscli.zip. Because the target is publicly accessible, authentication settings aren't required.

              - step:
                  type: Plugin
                  name: drone plugin
                  identifier: drone_plugin
                  spec:
                    connectorRef: account.docker
                    image: plugins/download
                    settings:
                      source: https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip ## Target to download
                      destination: awscli.zip ## File name to assign the downloaded file.

Expanding on this example, you could use the following commands in a subsequent Run step to unzip and install this tool:

unzip awscli.zip
sudo ./aws/install

You could also write a custom plugin that downloads, unzips, and installs the AWS CLI in one step.

TIPS

You can use variable expressions for Settings values. For example, credentials: <+stage.variables.[TOKEN_SECRET]> uses a stage variable.

Create text secrets for sensitive information, such as passwords and tokens, required by the plugin.

When you run the pipeline, check the log output to verify that the plugin works as intended.

Plugin settings

For information about a plugin's settings, go to the plugin's page on the Drone Plugins Marketplace. In addition to the settings described on a plugin's Marketplace page, each plugin has a README where you can read about the plugin's settings in detail. The README can include additional or uncommon settings that aren't described on the Marketplace page or the Harness CI documentation. You can find README links at the top of each plugin's Marketplace page.

Output variables

For information about output variables produced by plugins, go to Plugin step settings: Output variables.

Environment variables

Harness CI supports DRONE_ environment variables. For more information, go to the CI environment variables reference.

Plugin configuration examples

Here are some YAML examples and additional information about specific Drone plugins.

Artifact Metadata Publisher plugin

Use the artifact-metadata-publisher plugin to publish a URL of an artifact file to the Artifacts tab.

An example of the Plugin step configuration is provided below; however, your pipeline must also include steps to upload the file that you want to link to on the Artifacts tab, as demonstrated in Publish to the Artifacts tab.

               - step:
                  type: Plugin
                  name: metadata publisher plugin
                  identifier: metadata_publisher_plugin
                  spec:
                    connectorRef: YOUR_IMAGE_REGISTRY_CONNECTOR 
                    image: plugins/artifact-metadata-publisher
                    settings:
                      file_urls: https://storage.googleapis.com/mybucket/index.html ## Provide a URL to the artifact you want to show on the artifact tab. You can provide a list of multiple URLs to show multiple links on the Artifacts tab.
                      artifact_file: artifact.txt ## Provide any '.txt' file name, such as 'artifact.txt' or 'url.txt'. This is a required setting that Harness uses to store the artifact URL and display it on the Artifacts tab. This value is not the name of your uploaded artifact, and it has no relationship to the artifact object itself.

For more information about uploading and publishing artifacts, go to Build and push artifacts and images.

GitHub Actions plugin

With Harness Cloud build infrastructure, use the GitHub Action step.
With other build infrastructures, use the GitHub Actions Drone plugin in a Plugin step.

Jira plugin

Go to Integrate Jira in a CI pipeline.

Slack plugin

Harness has built-in notifications for email, Microsoft Teams, and Slack.

Convert Drone YAML to Harness YAML

The YAML examples in the Drone Plugins Marketplace can help you configure settings for a Plugin step in Harness CI. Many plugins offer both Harness and standalone Drone YAML samples, as indicated by the Drone/Harness toggle in the Example section.

Because Drone plugins can be used outside Harness CI, there are some differences, as explained below, in the YAML format when using Drone plugins in Harness CI versus outside Harness CI. This information focuses on the step YAML definition.

Step structure

The following examples compare the YAML structure for a step when a Drone plugin is used in a Drone pipeline and a Harness CI pipeline.

steps:
- name: download ## Step name
  image: plugins/download ## Plugin's Docker image
  settings: ## Plugin settings
    source: https://github.com/drone/drone-cli/releases/download/v0.8.5/drone_linux_amd64.tar.gz

            steps:
              - step:
                  type: Plugin ## Indicates that this is a Plugin step.
                  name: drone plugin ## Step name
                  identifier: drone_plugin ## Step ID
                  spec:
                    connectorRef: YOUR_IMAGE_REGISTRY_CONNECTOR 
                    image: plugins/download ## Plugin's Docker image
                    settings: ## Plugin settings
                      source: https://github.com/drone/drone-cli/releases/download/v0.8.5/drone_linux_amd64.tar.gz

Listed and nested settings

To convert list-formatted settings from Drone Plugin YAML to Harness CI YAML, merge them with comma separation.

Settings:
  tags:
    - latest
	- '1.0.1'
	- '1.0'

settings:
  tags: latest,1.0.1,1.0

For nested settings, maintain key-value pair definitions, as shown in the following Harness CI YAML example:

settings:
  mynestedsetting:
    nextlevel:
      varname: 100
  mylistsetting:
   - itemone
   - itemtwo

It's often easier to define complex settings in the Harness Pipeline Studio's YAML editor, rather than the Visual editor.

Text secrets

The following snippets illustrate the different ways that Drone and Harness CI handle text secrets.

steps:
    - name: download
	  image: plugins/download
	  settings:
	    username:
		    from_secret: username
		password:
			from_secret: password
		source: https://github.com/drone/drone-cli/releases/download/v0.8.5/drone_linux_amd64.tar.gz

  - step:
    type: Plugin
	name: download-drone
	identifier: downloaddrone
	spec:
	    connectorRef: mygithubconnector
		image: plugins/download
		privileged: false
		settings:
		    username: <+secrets.getValue("myusernamesecret")>
			password: <+secrets.getValue("mypasswordsecret")>
			source: https://github.com/drone/drone-cli/releases/download/v0.8.5/drone_linux_amd64.tar.gz

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Last updated 9 days ago

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