Digger has 2 main components: the CLI that runs within your CI and an orchestrator backend. The orchestrator enables parallelism, policies and other features that require centralisation.

This guide describes self-hosting the orchestrator backend as a binary aka “roll your own”. Self-hosting may come handy when using the cloud-based version of it is not an option (for example due to compliance requirements). More guides (docker, EC2, etc) are coming soon.

This guide is about self-hosting Digger Community Edition which is free and open source (Apache 2.0 license) (repo on GitHub). You do not need a license or an account on Digger Cloud to self-host Digger CE. If you require enterprise-grade features like Github Enterprise Server support, SSO / SAML, multi-team / multi-org - Talk to us

Prerequisites

  • Cloned repository of Digger
  • AtlasGo CLI
  • Postgres database (e.g. RDS)
  • Rights to install GitHub apps in your organisation

Download Digger API binary

Get it from releases. Note that it’s a separate binary, not to be confused the CLI agent that runs in the CI job.

Clone the Digger Repository

git clone https://github.com/diggerhq/digger.git

Set initial environment variables

GITHUB_ORG=your_github_org
HOSTNAME=your_public_digger_hostname
BEARER_AUTH_TOKEN=$(openssl rand -base64 12)
DATABASE_URL=postgres://.....
HTTP_BASIC_AUTH=1
HTTP_BASIC_AUTH_USERNAME=myorg
HTTP_BASIC_AUTH_PASSWORD=$(openssl rand -base64 12)
ALLOW_DIRTY=false # set to true if the database has already a schema configured

Start the service

cd digger/backend
wget https://github.com/diggerhq/digger/releases/download/v<DIGGER_VERSION>/digger-api-<OS>-<CPU_ARCH> -C ./diggerapi
chmod +x ./diggerapi
atlas migrate apply --url $DATABASE_URL --allow-dirty
./diggerapi

Note: depending on the OS security settings you may need to allow the binary to run.

Go to your_digger_hostname:3000/projects; you should see the dashboard. The setup is not complete yet!

Create GitHub app

Go to your_digger_hostname:3000/github/setup and click the Setup button. Follow the instructions on GitHub to install the app to the repositories in your organisation.

After the setup is done, GitHub should redirect you to the summary page at your_digger_hostname:3000/github/exchange-code

Copy the values into the following environment variables and restart the service.

GITHUB_APP_ID=
GITHUB_APP_CLIENT_ID=
GITHUB_APP_CLIENT_SECRET=
GITHUB_APP_PRIVATE_KEY_BASE64=
GITHUB_WEBHOOK_SECRET=

Install the GitHub app

On the exchange-code page (see above) click the installation link at the top and select the repositories.

From here on it’s the same steps as in the Quickstart:

  • Create digger.yml
  • Create workflow file
  • Create secrets
  • Create a PR to verify that Digger works