Concourse: the continuous thing-doer

Concourse is an automation system written in Go. It is most commonly used for CI/CD, and is built to scale to any kind of automation pipeline, from simple to complex.

Concourse is very opinionated about a few things: idempotency, immutability, declarative config, stateless workers, and reproducible builds.

Installation

Concourse is distributed as a single concourse binary, available on the Releases page.

If you want to just kick the tires, jump ahead to the Quick Start.

In addition to the concourse binary, there are a few other supported formats. Consult their GitHub repos for more information:

• Docker image
• Kubernetes Helm chart
• BOSH release

Quick Start

$ wget https://concourse-ci.org/docker-compose.yml
$ docker-compose up -d
Creating docs_concourse-db_1 ... done
Creating docs_concourse_1    ... done

Concourse will be running at http://localhost:8080. You can log in with the username/password as test/test.

Next, install fly by downloading it from the web UI at http://localhost:8080/download-fly and target your local Concourse as the test user:

$ fly -t ci login -c http://localhost:8080 -u test -p test
logging in to team 'main'

target saved

You can follow our Getting Started Tutorial to learn how to write Concourse pipelines.

Configuring a Pipeline

Concourse has no GUI for configuration. Instead, pipelines are defined in declarative YAML files:

resources:
- name: booklit
  type: git
  source: {uri: "https://github.com/concourse/booklit"}

jobs:
- name: unit
  plan:
  - get: booklit
    trigger: true
  - task: test
    file: booklit/ci/test.yml

Most operations are done via the accompanying fly CLI. If you've got Concourse installed, try saving the above example as booklit.yml, target your Concourse instance, and then run:

fly -t ci set-pipeline -p booklit -c booklit.yml

These pipeline files are self-contained, making them easily portable between Concourse instances.

Learn More

• The Official Site for documentation, reference material, and example pipelines.
• The Getting Started Tutorial to learn the basics of Concourse
• See Concourse in action with our own pipelines
• Hang around in the GitHub discussions or in Discord
• See what we're working on the project board.

Contributing

Our user base is basically everyone that develops software (and wants it to work).

It's a lot of work, and we need your help! If you're interested, check out our contributing docs.