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Setting up a new project

A minimal Outerbounds project consists of four elements:

  1. A Git repository,
  2. An obproject.toml configuration file,
  3. A top-level README.md,
  4. A CI/CD config to update a project.

To get started with a blank slate, you can clone the ob-project-empty repository which has these elements prepopulated.

note

Our examples use GitHub Actions for CI/CD. Outerbounds also supports GitLab CI/CD, Azure DevOps, and CircleCI. See the CI/CD integration guide for platform-specific configurations.

Configuring a project​

A project is configured through a top-level obproject.toml configuration file. At the minimum, you need the following fields in the file:

platform = "my-outerbounds.outerbounds.com"
project = "ob_project_empty"
title = "Empty Outerbounds Project"

You should change the values to match your project:

  • platform is the URL of your private Outerbounds deployment.
  • project is the identifier of the project, use only lowercase alphanumeric characters and underscores. By convention, you can have the project name match the name of the repository.
  • title is a human-readable name shown on the project overview page.

Enabling CI/CD access​

Next, you need to allow CI/CD to push changes from the new repository to Outerbounds. This is done by setting up a new machine user - follow the first 20 seconds of the setup instruction video and make sure that you

  1. Name the machine user as follows: my-repo-cicd replacing my-repo with the repository name (you can use hyphens instead of underscores) and make sure the -cicd suffix is present.
  2. Set up the right repository name.

Leave branch and other options empty.

Pushing a project update​

By default the GitHub Actions script is configured to trigger a project update whenever you push a commit to the main branch or to a pull request.

To test the CI/CD access, change the README.md - or make any other commit you like - and push it. You should see a GitHub Action being triggered. You can follow progress in the GitHub Actions UI. If all goes well, you should see an empty overview page like this on Outerbounds:

If you see this, congrats - you have a project up and running 🎉 You can push more updates and check the Code view which shows the latest commits included in the deployed project.

Common issues​

If you see an error like this

it indicates that the CI/CD worker is not able to access Outerbounds. Double-check the machine user you have configured. Note the CI/CD User in the message: It needs to match the name of the machine user, in the above case, ob-project-empty-cicd.

Once you have a blank slate deployed, it's time to start building on top of it.