Introducing the CircleCI Swissknife orb
CircleCI is a pretty popular CI service that is used by a large number of organizations. One of the reasons for CircleCI’s success is the ease with which they let you run a variety of steps across various executors right from docker containers to windows VMs etc.
Orbs are CircleCI’s methodology of sharing common functionality across repos and orbs. It turns out that there are a lot of checks that every repo ends up needing and that everyone codes up in some form or another. These checks are re-invented at every company and constantly evolve over time.
In order to share this knowledge & tooling, and make it dead simple to re-use this functionality we created an orb called Swissknife. What started off as a simple experiment, turned out useful enough that ~20 organizations are using today.
One thing however that we have heard a few times when talking to people, is not knowing why certain commands were made and what its intended usage was for. As we introduce more commands functionality we will talk about them here.
Like all other Orbs the code is open source and everyone is welcome to contribute. As of March 2020 the Swissknife Orb has been run on 55,000 pipelines and counting.
Stay tuned for some interesting functionality that will help make your build pipelines faster, smarter, and more useful.
