How to use the VS Code Tekton Pipelines extension

The Tekton Project, which was announced in March after branching off from the Knative project, is creating excitement as a Kubernetes-native CI/CD pipeline tool.

Tekton offers the flexibility and agnosticism that Kubernetes is celebrated for and is positioned to become the first open standardized engine for executing pipelines. Although the project is still in the early stages of development, we couldn’t wait to start making it easier for developers to jump on the Tekton train. In this article, we'll take a quick look at the Tekton Pipelines extension and how to use it.

The initial release of the Visual Studio (VS) Code Tekton Pipelines extension by Red Hat was developed over the course of a summer internship by Lindsey Tulloch with support from developers of the OpenShift Connector extension, Denis Golovin and Mohit Suman and the Red Hat Pipelines team—in particular, Vincent Demeester and Sunil Thaha.

The Tekton Pipelines extension offers all of the same functionality as the Tekton CLI tool as well as a pipeline view. This not only allows developers to visualize pipeline deployments they're developing but also allows for intuitive interaction with pipeline resources.

Today, the Tekton Pipelines extension is available on VSCode Marketplace and works with the latest version of VSCode.

Supported Features:

• Snippets for Pipeline Resources
• Pipeline View
• CLI functionality implemented via clicking on the desired pipeline resource

Using the Tekton Pipelines extension

Installing the Tekton Pipelines extension will trigger the installation of both the Kubernetes extension and the latest release of the Tekton CLI tool tkn.  Once these are installed, you will see a “Tekton Pipelines” view in your VSCode explorer with Pipelines, Tasks, ClusterTasks, and PipelineResource as top-level tree nodes. Clicking on any of these nodes expands the view to display nested resources.

• Pipelines shows: Pipelines > PipelineRuns > TaskRuns.
• Tasks shows: Tasks > TaskRuns.
• ClusterTasks shows: ClusterTasks.
• PipelineResources shows: PipelineResources.

Clicking on any of these resources displays a range of actions, matching the functionality of the tkn CLI tool.

Actions available for a Tekton Pipeline/Task/ClusterTask

• Pipeline -> Start — Start a Pipeline with user-selected resources, parameters and service account.
• Pipeline -> Restart — Restart the last PipelineRun.
• Pipeline/Task/ClusterTask -> List — List all Pipelines in a Cluster.
• Pipeline -> Describe — Print the JSON of a selected Pipeline.
• Pipeline/Task/ClusterTask -> Delete — Delete the selected Pipeline.

Actions available for a Tekton PipelineRun

• PipelineRun/TaskRun -> List — List all PipelineRuns/TaskRuns in a Pipeline/Task.
• PipelineRun/TaskRun -> Describe — Describe the selected PipelineRun/TaskRun.
• PipelineRun/TaskRun -> Logs — Print Logs from the selected PipelineRun/TaskRun.
• PipelineRun/TaskRun -> Delete — Delete the selected PipelineRun/TaskRun.
• PipelineRun -> Cancel — Cancel the selected PipelineRun.

The Tekton Project is still in the early stages of development, so there is plenty of space for expansion and improvement within the extension. Of course, suggestions and pull requests are always welcome on the GitHub repo, found here.