Tuyauterie

The Idea

As I built more projects and maintained multiple repositories, I found myself copying the same GitHub Actions workflows over and over again. Each time I wanted to build a Docker image, deploy to Kubernetes, or build a Nix flake, I’d have to duplicate the same YAML files across repositories. Over time, things would get outdated and I constantly needed to backport improvements from newer projects into older ones. Ugh

Tuyauterie (French for “plumbing”) is my solution to this problem: a centralized collection of reusable GitHub Actions workflows that can be referenced from any of my projects. Instead of maintaining dozens of copies of similar workflows, I can now reference a single source of truth and keep my CI/CD pipelines consistent and up-to-date.

What It Does

Tuyauterie provides a single entrypoint workflow (tuyauterie.yaml) that orchestrates various CI/CD processes and their executions. This centralized workflow handles different automation tasks based on your configuration, making it easy to manage complex pipelines from one place.

How It Works

The workflow is configured through a .tuyauterie.yaml file in each repository that uses it. This configuration file defines the build type, release strategy, and deployment settings. Here’s an example:

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version: 1

build:
  type: golang  # python, nix, or docker
  dockerfile: Dockerfile
  upload_artifacts: true

release:
  rolling: false  # publish on every commit to main
  on-tag: true    # publish when a tag is created

deploy:
  gitops:
    enable: true
    repository: "notarock/kubernetes-manifests"
    manifest: "k8s/deployment.yaml"

To use Tuyauterie in a project, you reference the main workflow and it reads your configuration file to orchestrate the appropriate build, release, and deployment steps:

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jobs:
  tuyauterie:
    uses: notarock/tuyauterie/.github/workflows/tuyauterie.yml@main
    with:
      tuyauterie-path: '.tuyauterie.yaml'
    secrets:
      GITOPS_REPOSITORY_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Based on the configuration, Tuyauterie orchestrates multiple jobs:

The workflow provides clear feedback through GitHub Actions job summaries, showing exactly what was built, tested, and deployed:

This approach keeps my CI/CD logic DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) and makes it much easier to maintain and improve my workflows over time. When I optimize a workflow in Tuyauterie, all my projects benefit from the improvement automatically.