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"Hello, world!" with MintPress

Learn how to use MintPress to run a simple "Hello, world!" script stored in a Git repository.

After following this guide you should know how to:

  • minimally configure any Git repository to be used by MintPress
  • create MintPress projects to organize your execution pipeline
  • connect a remote Git repository to a MintPress project
  • run a script using MintPress

Prerequisites​

To proceed with this tutorial, you must have:

  • a Git repository you can write and MintPress can connect to
  • Git credentials (username/password or a personal access token (PAT)) that MintPress will use for accessing your Git repository
  • a working MintPress instance you can access and log in to
  • authorisation to create projects in the given MintPress instance

Preparing your Git repository​

Understanding Git revisions​

A Git revision is a specific point in the history of a Git repository. It can be a branch name, a tag or a commit SHA.

  • Branch Name: A branch is a pointer to a specific commit, which moves as new commits are added, for example, main or develop branches.
  • Commit SHA: Every commit in Git has a unique SHA-1 hash, which is a 40-character string. You can use this hash to refer to a specific commit. For example, e9f227c9a4c5c9a72134a6cb23a7e4e1e4a6d18a. You can also use the SHA's prefix to refer to it, like e9f227c for this example.
  • Tags: A tag is a reference to a specific commit, often used to mark release points like v1.0.0.

To learn more about Git revisions, you can read the official Git documentation on revisions.

Whenever you want to execute any code using MintPress, you'll always need to provide the Git repository and Git revision that point to the code that MintPress will run. MintPress provides utilities and structures to make managing those easier. We'll look at the different ways of linking your Git repository and revisions in upcoming tutorials.

Defining your actions​

The first thing that MintPress will look up after fetching your Git repository is for an actions.rb file at the root of your repository. This file is where you define the actions that you can run from MintPress.

An action can be any code written in Ruby, including calling and importing other files, making HTTP requests or executing shell scripts.

As a simple example, in your Git repository, we can define a hello_world action by adding this code to an actions.rb file at the repository's root folder:

action :hello_world do
  log.info 'Hello world :-)'
end

After saving the actions.rb file, making a commit and pushing it to our Git remote, we are ready to run this code in MintPress.

Using commit SHAs

You can get the latest commit's SHA in a Git repository by running:

git rev-parse --verify HEAD

Creating a MintPress project​

With a working MintPress instance, log in using your credentials and reach the "Projects" page from the sidebar.

Click on the "Create project" button at the top right, give the project a name and a code and click on "Create project" at the bottom of the dialog.

Create project dialog

Wait for the project to appear in your projects list and click on it when it does.

Adding a Git repository to your project​

Inside the project's page, click on the "Git remotes" tab and then on "Add git remote".

Create git remote dialog

Give it a name, paste in the Git repository link and add your credentials, either username/password or an SSH key (you can optionally provide the SSH key passphrase if required) and click "Add Git remote" at the bottom of the dialog.

Your Git remote will be ready for use once it is visible in the remotes list for the current project.

info

MintPress supports multiple Git remotes per project, allowing you to run actions from different Git repositories at any moment.

Running the actions from the Git repository​

Now that we have linked a Git remote to our project, we can run the hello_world action we defined in the actions.rb file.

Using the "Run" button at the top of the screen, click on "Run change". The project will be automatically selected if you are on the project page, so we just need to select the Git remote we'll use.

Run change dialog

Select the Git remote you just added, add the Git revision MintPress should use to fetch the code and write the action name we defined in our actions.rb file.

Click on "Run change" at the bottom of the dialog and we're done!

The UI will take us to the change screen, where we'll be able to follow our change's progress until it's completed.

Run change dialog

Following your change's logs​

In your change's page, you can see the change logs on the "Change logs" tab.

Activity change logs

The logs are updated in real time as MintPress builds the runner image and the code executes. At the end of the change execution, you should see the Hello world :-) message printed by our code in the actions.rb file.

Change logs

The logs generated by MintPress will stay available in the change page even after the change has finished.

If you'd like to share your change's logs as a file, there is a "Download" button inside the "Change logs" tab.

What to do next​