Welcome to the MonkeyCI documentation center!

What is MonkeyCI?

MonkeyCI is a CI/CD pipeline runner that allows you to use code in addition to yaml or edn for configuration.

Suppose you're working on your newest project. Of course, at some point you will want to automatically build it, maybe also deploy it somewhere. And run your unit tests. All automated! MonkeyCI allows you to do all those things, and more!

Why?

What makes MonkeyCI different from other similar tools? We allow you to use code to define your build pipelines. Most other tools only allow yaml. We also support this, but only for the basic configurations. For more complex situations, you will need conditions, maybe even loops. After a while, your nice yaml script starts to look more and more like a coding experiment gone wrong. Our philosophy is: for coding, use a programming language! And our language of choice is Clojure. Why Clojure? Well, you can read all about that here.

This opens up a lot of possibilities. For example, you can write unit tests to verify your build script or create custom conditions to support your complex workflows.

MonkeyCI also allows you to run your builds locally, for those one-off scenario's that you don't want to use build credits for, or to do some local fine-tuning that unit tests cannot capture.

Getting Started

In MonkeyCI, you can create repositories, that refer to a Git repository that resides on one of the supported platforms. Whenever a build is triggered, it will be displayed on the repository page.

Register

First off, go to the login page and register as a new user. Currently, you can only register if you either have a GitHub or a Bitbucket account, but we will expand this in the future. Choosing one of these will make it easier for you to start watching changes in repositories hosted on those respective platforms.

Add Repositories

MonkeyCI uses webhooks to get notified of any changes in external repositories. We don't host repositories of our own. If a repository is being watched for changes, and it contains a build script in the /.monkeyci directory, MonkeyCI will trigger a build. From then on it's totally up to you: what jobs are in the build, what artifacts are being produced, etc...

Your First Build Script

Now it's time to write your first build script! The best way to learn how to do that is by looking at some examples.

First take a look at the basic example. After that, you can move on to a more advanced example. MonkeyCI also supports edn, json and yaml. We also have a cookbook for common scenarios.