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Get started with HSF

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Welcome to the HSF onboarding guide. Discover how Harness accelerate onboarding and adoption by reducing setup time and maintaining best practices

Pre Deployment of HSF​

Prerequisites​

Before beginning, ensure you have:

  • Access to a Harness Account
  • Ability to create an admin level token

If you do not meet all these prerequisites but think your organization could benefit from HSF, please reach out to your account team.

Post Deployment of HSF​

Now that HSF has been deployed, what’s next?

Create an Organization​

  1. Go into IDP → Workflows → Execute Harness Organization Setup → Enter name and description → Next → Review → Create
    • Why? Assuming that HSF was the first thing that was deployed into your account it is important for you to have a place to learn and start development.
    • In this example we are creating a Lab Organization
    • By default this workflow requires an approval from someone in the HSF Admins group.
    • Approve to review even though there is nothing to be seen yet. Then you will wait for the second approval. Approve what is being added.
    • Once completed click Access Harness Organization. You can also go into IDP → Catalog → Resources

Create Projects​

  1. Go into IDP → Workflows → Execute Harness Project Setup → Select the organization we created, enter name and description → Next → Review → Create
  2. Just like creating an organization, click Approve to review even though there is nothing to be seen yet. Then wait for the second approval. Approve what is being added.
    • Below are the resoures that are now currently in the account - one organization named Lab and two projects named infrastructure and workshop both in the Lab organization.

Customize your Project configuration and apply it​

  1. Clone harness-template-library and custom-harness-template-library locally
  2. Copy the harness-project directory from harness-template-library and into custom-harness-template-library
  3. In the Harness Console go into Account Settings → Variables → Find and copy the Ids for Custom Template Library Repo and Custom Template Library Connector
  4. In custom-harness-template-library/harness-project/.harness go into catalog_template.yaml and find the properties template_library_connector and template_library_repo and paste in the Ids from above after “variable.account.” It should look like this:
  5. Change properties: repo_source: default: to custom
  6. Go into the idp_registration_mgr.yaml file
    • add in: 
        - org: Harness_Platform_Management
          project: Solutions Factory
          workflow: 
               - name: harness-project
  7. Commit and push these changes
  8. Go to Pipelines → Run Register Custom IDP Templates
    • After this runs, you can verify by going into the workflow → View Raw YAML and you will see that the source change to custom-template-library
  9. Create a new project using the new custom workflow:
    • Go into IDP → Workflows → Harness Project Setup
  10. Make a change in the custom workflow - let’s create a new security group called “Security Champions”
    • Go back into custom-harness-template-library and create a new file called Security_Champions.yaml under harness-project/templates/roles that includes what privileges this group should have. Sample permission sets are included under the permission_sets directory. It should look something like this:
    • Create a new file under harness-project/templates/groups that tags the new group. For our example our group will have project viewer and all the privileges that we included in the role. It will look like this:
    • Commit and push these changes.
    • Some sample permission sets are included in permission_sets
  11. Apply the new project custom template to all the projects that are in your account
    • Run a drift check on the project you crated in step 4. Workspaces → Lab_customized_project → Check for Drift
    • After it runs you will see new resources that need to be created
    • You will see the workspace for the customized project to be apply needed
      • Why? This is a new change in the source code not a modifications that exist on the system
    • Click Provision and Run the pipeline to apply the change
    • If you go into user groups for the customized project you will see the new Security_Champions group!

Bulk Update Workspaces to Use New Configurations​

  1. For the projects you created before switching over to use the custom-harness-template-library — Go to Pipelines and run Bulk Workspace Management
    • The workspace_type will be type assigned to the workspace
    • workspace_change_source should be changed to “yes”
    • Set the workspace_action to “apply”
  2. Approve the Provision pipelines that get started - this will change the tags and source to use the custom template library and apply the changes. For this example the Security Champions group will be added to all the projects.
    • The approval was added for an extra layer of protection where you can check to make sure a breaking change won’t be added.

There will be a lot of resources that are created into your account once HSF is deployed. Be sure to review this document to understand what was created and where it all lives.