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Onboarding guide

The Harness Platform and modules are built to help developers and DevOps teams deliver software with the highest velocity, quality, security, reliability, and resilience, while achieving the lowest cost possible and remaining inside the governance guardrails necessary for meeting organizational goals.

Follow this guide to get started with the Harness Platform.

Access your Harness account​

Harness offers both SaaS and on-premises editions.

Harness SaaS is a fully-managed cloud version of the Harness Platform. Harness offers free, team, and enterprise plan tiers. For more information about plan options and pricing, go to Subscriptions and licenses.

tip

Harness offers a free tier of the Harness Software Delivery Platform to help you on your software delivery journey.

Sign up for free and get started with Harness today.

To create an account on the free plan, sign up for a free account and then sign in to your Harness account.

New accounts on the team or enterprise plan must receive an invitation email from an Account Administrator to be able to sign in. Contact Harness Support if you need more information or if you do not know your Account Administrator.

Review key concepts​

Get familiar with terminology and functionality found in the Harness Platform and Harness modules.

Create projects and invite collaborators​

To begin, create a project and invite a few collaborators. Harness recommends creating a sample project with a few pilot users to get familiar with the Harness Platform.

Once you're familiar with the mechanics, you can create more organizations and projects or represent your business units and product development initiatives.

Manage users​

Learn about authentication and RBAC to understand how to manage users in your Harness Account.

You can configure broad or highly-granular permissions structures.

You can also automate provisioning of users from external sources, along with their user group memberships and role assignments:

Configure shared resources​

Shared resources in Harness include delegates, connectors, secrets, and more. You'll use these resources with practically everything you do in Harness.

You can configure these at the account, organization, or project scope depending on how broadly you want to share them.

Shared resources tutorials​

Automate setup of shared resources​

Shared resources created at the account scope are shared with all organizations and projects in your account.

Harness recommends you use the Harness Terraform Provider or the Harness REST API to automate configuration of these shard resources.

You can achieve a high degree of automation and repeatability in deploying and managing resources on Harness by integrating the Harness Terraform Provider into your Harness onboarding workflows.

Use the following documentation and Harness Terraform Registry to the Install the Harness Terraform Provider and set up Terraform configuration:

A sample Terraform deployment repo is available for your use.

For the best results, follow best practices for Terraform and CI/CD, such as:

  • Source control: Save your Terraform configurations in a version control system like Git. This helps in tracking changes and enables collaboration.
  • Automate plan and apply: Implement CI/CD tools to automate the terraform plan and terraform apply steps. Popular choices include using Harness CD Pipelines to automate and onboard services.
  • State management: Use remote state storage solutions, such as Terraform Cloud or AWS S3 with state locking, to ensure that your state is consistent across various environments or teams.
  • Notifications: Implement notifications for Terraform actions. If something goes wrong during terraform apply, it can be beneficial to have notifications sent to Slack, Email, etc.
  • Monitoring and Logging: Monitor your infrastructure with tools like Grafana or Prometheus. Logging changes and activities help in audit trails.
  • Secrets management: Use tools like HashiCorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager to securely store sensitive information like API keys.
  • Backup: Regularly back up your Terraform state files to prevent data loss.
  • Documentation: Maintain a well-documented record of all Terraform scripts and modules. Documenting the design decisions and usage instructions ensures that any team member can understand and use the automation built around the Terraform provider.

Dive into modules​

After onboarding to the Harness Platform, you're ready to start using Harness modules to supercharge your SDLC.

Explore module documentation to get started with Harness modules and start building CI/CD pipelines.

The Harness Platform has several cross-module features that can optimize and enhance your pipelines and module usage, including:

Become a Harness Certified Expert​

Explore the Harness University to find instructor-led training opportunities and test your skills in module certification courses.