Pipelines in Pipelines

Overview

A mechanism to define and execute Pipelines in Pipelines, alongside Tasks and Custom Tasks, for a more in-depth background and inspiration, refer to the proposal TEP-0056.

🌱 Pipelines in Pipelines not yet alpha feature. If the enable-api-fields feature flag is set to "alpha" users may specify pipelineRef or pipelineSpec in a pipelineTask, however this feature is not yet supported/implemented. Specifying a pipelineRef or pipelineSpec in a pipelineTask will not cause the Pipeline to run at this time.

Specifying pipelineRef in pipelineTasks

Defining Pipelines in Pipelines at authoring time, by either specifying PipelineRef or PipelineSpec fields to a PipelineTask alongside TaskRef and TaskSpec.

For example, a Pipeline named security-scans which is run within a Pipeline named clone-scan-notify where the PipelineRef is used:

apiVersion: tekton.dev/v1
kind: Pipeline
metadata:
  name: security-scans
spec:
  tasks:
    - name: scorecards
      taskRef:
        name: scorecards
    - name: codeql
      taskRef:
        name: codeql
---
apiVersion: tekton.dev/v1
kind: Pipeline
metadata:
  name: clone-scan-notify
spec:
  tasks:
    - name: git-clone
      taskRef:
        name: git-clone
    - name: security-scans
      pipelineRef:
        name: security-scans
    - name: notification
      taskRef:
        name: notification

Specifying pipelineSpec in pipelineTasks

The pipelineRef example can be modified to use PipelineSpec instead of PipelineRef to instead embed the Pipeline specification:

apiVersion: tekton.dev/v1
kind: Pipeline
metadata:
  name: clone-scan-notify
spec:
  tasks:
    - name: git-clone
      taskRef:
        name: git-clone
    - name: security-scans
      pipelineSpec:
        tasks:
          - name: scorecards
            taskRef:
              name: scorecards
          - name: codeql
            taskRef:
              name: codeql
    - name: notification
      taskRef:
        name: notification

Specifying Parameters

Pipelines in Pipelines consume Parameters in the same way as Tasks in Pipelines

apiVersion: tekton.dev/v1
kind: Pipeline
metadata:
  name: clone-scan-notify
spec:
  params:
    - name: repo
      value: $(params.repo)
  tasks:
    - name: git-clone
      params:
        - name: repo
          value: $(params.repo)      
      taskRef:
        name: git-clone
    - name: security-scans
      params:
        - name: repo
          value: $(params.repo)
      pipelineRef:
        name: security-scans
    - name: notification
      taskRef:
        name: notification