Discord Bot Pipeline - GitHub Setup

This post is part 3 of a 10 part series:

• Part 1 - Discord Bot Pipeline - Intro
• Part 2 - Discord Bot Pipeline - GCP Setup
• Part 3 - Discord Bot Pipeline - GitHub Setup (This Post)
• Part 4 - Discord Bot Pipeline - Terraform Setup
• Part 5 - Discord Bot Pipeline - GitHub Actions Setup
• Part 6 - Discord Bot Pipeline - Making Terraform Changes
• Part 7 - Discord Bot Pipeline - Discord Specific Terraform Setup
• Part 8 - Discord Bot Pipeline - More Setup
• Part 9 - Discord Bot Pipeline - Creating The Bot
• Part 10 - Discord Bot Pipeline - Conclusion

Previously in this series, we set up our GCP organization and created an admin project that will carry out Terraform actions. Now let’s set up a GitHub project to integrate with this GCP project. The goal here is to use GitHub workflows in order to manage your projects with Terraform. The details of Terraform are beyond the scope of this series, but the next section will provide a brief overview.

GitHub Setup

First, create a new GitHub project by navigating to https://github.com/new. Create a project like terraform-controller and clone it locally to your machine. From the repository’s settings tab, go to Secrets and variables -> Actions.

We are going to create three repository secrets that will be used by the workflows to interact with Terraform and our GCP project. Click New Repository secret and add the following:

1. GCP_BILLING_ACCOUNT_ID
2. GCP_ORGANIZATION_ID
3. GCP_SA_KEY

As in the previous step, your GCP billing account ID can be found by running:

gcloud beta billing accounts list --format=json \
  | jq -r '.[0].name' \
  | cut -d'/' -f2

And your organization ID can be found by running:

gcloud organizations list --format=json \
  | jq -r '.[0].name' \
  | cut -d'/' -f2

The service account was created in the previous step and stored in ~/.config/gcloud/<your domain>-tf-controller.json. Copy the entire contents of this file when creating the GCP_SA_KEY secret. These steps are shown in the gallery below. Note: I created these images with a different repository name but the gist is the same.

• 1 - Repo Creation
• 2 - Actions Secrets
• 3 - Adding Secrets

We will be leveraging branch naming conventions in order to handle Terraform operations. Our default branch is main, which will contain workflows and templates for a basic Terraform configuration. Each of our projects will be handled by a branch with a prefix like _deploy. So for a project like discord-bots, we will have a branch discord-bots_deploy. This branch will be used to apply Terraform configs specifically for our discord-bots project. In the next section, we will add the basic Terraform configurations necessary for spinning up new projects using our infrastructure.