orbs-sync

List, fetch and import CircleCI's orbs with dependencies in mind. Designed to sync orbs between CircleCI.com and self-hosted CircleCI server instances.

Codes are hugely depending on / deriving from CircleCI's CLI.

Quick-start

1. Download one of convenient pre-built executables and extract it accordingly.
2. ./orbs-sync sync --src-token YOUR_PERSONAL_TOKEN_FOR_CIRCLECI_DOTCOM --dst-host https://YOUR-CIRCLECI-SERVER-HOSTNAME.example.com --dst-token YOUR_PERSONAL_TOKEN_FOR_CIRCLECI_SERVER

Then your CircleCI server instance should have all of CircleCI's official orbs in it. It may take as much as 5 minutes to sync all the orbs, depending on your location and the speed of your Internet connection.

Deep dive

Simply run from the source code

go run main.go

Basically running pre-built executables is recommended, unless you are actively editing the source codes, because go run effectively builds an executable every time you call it.

Build your own executable

E.g. if you are to build an executable for Linux on x86-64 (AMD64), you would run:

GOOS_LIST_OVERRIDE=("linux") GOARCH_LIST_OVERRIDE=("amd64") ./build-and-pack-all.sh

Refer to the official Go documentation for valid combinations of GOOS and GOARCH.

Note that the shell script depends on Zip, tar and gzip for packaging.

More commands

There are multiple commands that are effectively working under the sync command.

• collect - crawl CircleCI's orbs registry and collect all the available and visible public orbs.
• resolve-dependencies - sort orbs based on dependencies; orbs installable without dependencies come first.
• bulk-import - import multiple orbs at once in the order of the given list.

See ./orbs-sync help for details to run these commands separately.

Technical notes

• The slowest part will be bulk-import. We need to import each version of each orb one-by-one, while we can fetch multiple versions of multiple orbs in bulk.

  • This is why sync takes account of orbs already available on the destination instance.

• The collect command collects all the public orbs which are available and visible.

  • Note that it does not recognize hidden orbs and private orbs by default.

    • Due to this nature the dependency resolver would say that some orbs have unresolvable dependencies if those orbs are depending on hidden/private orbs.
    • You should be able to tune this nature by passing customized --must-include arguments.
      • Tips: The argument can be specified multiple times to specify multiple orbs.

  • Due to technical limitations, it is not easy to collect some/selected versions of orbs.

    • This is why sync collects everything, then filter out those already on the destination instance. Implementing filtering mechanisms need complex codes with small benefits in terms of execution speed.

  • For this reason this programme can emit thousands of API requests in a short period, causing heavy loads for CircleCI. Do not abuse this, otherwise you can be banned!

• The programme can consume around 1 GiB of memory. This consumption happens as fetched orbs are loaded onto RAM.