Getting Started with Conducto on Windows

Getting started with Conducto on Windows is easy. Since it never hurts to have step-by-step instructions, I will do a walk-through of installing Conducto and its dependencies on a machine running Windows 10.

There are a condensed set of instructions at the end of this post.

Prerequisites

First, you need to install our dependencies:

Python (≥ 3.6.1) — https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/

Docker — https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-windows/

You will not need a Docker account.

Installing Python

If you are getting started with Python it is probably best to just select the latest Python 3 installer for Windows. As of this writing, that is Python 3.8.2. Download & install the Python from here. I will assume you follow the defaults.

The installer includes a system wide installation of the Python Launcher. You can learn more about the launcher here. Test your Python install by going to a PowerShell prompt and typing py --version. I get output that looks like this.

PowerShell with Python installation check

Installing Docker

Get the docker installation from here and install the download. This should be sufficient, but I’ll guide you through a few checks here as well.

You can test your install by running the following command from a PowerShell prompt. You should see “Hello from Docker!” and some explanatory details.

docker run --rm hello-world

You can also verify the Docker Desktop settings. Start “Docker Desktop” from the start menu. You may need to right click on the Docker whale in the lower right system tray and select “Dashboard”. Conducto requires that the C drive is shared with your containers. From the dashboard, click the settings cog in the title bar and then click Resources and File Sharing.

While you are there you can also check the Advanced settings. This allows you to limit the CPUs and Memory assigned to Docker containers. I found the Docker default of 2 CPUs to be quite conservative for my 12 CPU machine. Conducto will follow these resource limits when assigning parallel workers so this is an important limit to know about to maximize your pipeline through-put.

Finally, Conducto!

Now you can get started with Conducto. There are only 3 steps:

• Create a Conducto account.
• Install our python package.
• Run the demo.

Conducto Pipelines are interactively launched from the command line and we recommend the Windows PowerShell shell.

Create an account

Creating an account is easy. Just register here, click the link in the verification email we send you, login, and you are good to go.

Our sign up page

Install our python package

We recommend that you create a virtual environment. Virtual environments are a common way in Python development to isolate the Python level dependencies from your system. Launch the PowerShell command window and the following commands will prepare a virtual environment with the Conducto package installed. Start a virtual environment for your Conducto pipelines by doing the following. It is always a good idea to keep package managers up-to-date and the Python pip package installer is no exception.

py -m venv venv
.\venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1
# update the pip package manager
python -m pip install --upgrade pip
# install our package
pip install conducto

You can confirm successful installation by running this.

conducto --version

Note that you can exit the virtual environment when you are done like this. But don’t do that quite yet because you’ll need to be in the virtual environment with conducto installed to run our demo.

deactivate

Run the demo

Finally, grab our demo and run it. The demo will print a URL and attempt to automatically open a web browser that shows your live pipeline.

wget https://github.com/conducto/demo/archive/master.zip -o demo.zip
Expand-Archive .\demo.zip -DestinationPath .
cd demo-master
python demo.py hello --local

If you’d prefer to use a git clone, you can do so like this supposing you have git installed.

git clone https://github.com/conducto/demo.git
cd demo
python demo.py hello --local

This command will launch your browser showing the pipeline ready to run and interact. Here is what it looks like in my browser.

This is the CI/CD demo. The right hand node pane will guide you.

If you’d rather, you can fully interact with your pipeline from a notebook or a phone. Just navigate to the URL shown in the command line output.

You can even view your pipelines on the go!

A good next step is to read our Introduction to Conducto Pipelines.

Condensed Set-up Instructions for Windows 10

Install Python from the Windows Python release page.

Install Docker from the Docker Desktop for Windows page.

Create a Conducto account at our sign-up page.

At a PowerShell prompt, install our Python package.

py -m venv venv
.\venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1
# update the pip package manager
python -m pip install --upgrade pip
# install our package
pip install conducto

In this same prompt, you can run our demo.

wget https://github.com/conducto/demo/archive/master.zip -o demo.zip
Expand-Archive .\demo.zip -DestinationPath .
python demo-master\hello.py --local