So, I need to run a Go pipeline that isn’t dependent on a material, meaning Go’s out the box implementation of a material. What I’m talking about is a dumb hack to get a production deployment working in an environment with stringent security policies. We have two Go servers. One orchestrates pipelines in our pre-production environments. Because of the security concerns we have a second Go server just to deploy production. When a package has gone through all of the quality gates in pre-production it is ready to deploy to production and the deployable packages are placed in an artifact repository (right now a file share) that is accessible by the production Go server.

When we want to deploy production, we manually trigger a pipeline on the production Go server that kicks off a job to get the deploy package from the package repository and place it in the production Go server’s artifact repository. With the package in the production, all of the production deploy agents have access to deploy it. Normally, this “get files from a share” business would be handled by a material setup in Go, but I couldn’t find one that could poll a file share and sticking these binaries in a source repo that was accessible to the preproduction and production domains sounded like overkill at the time.

What would be even better and make me fall in love with Go even more would be if two server could talk to each other then I could just have the production Go server poll the preprod server to see if it has a new package in some pipeline. I guess I could

• do a little Java code and do some type of file share repository poller
• setup Artifactory or NuGet and use the pollers already build for them
• explore the Go API and see if I could do a service to have the servers talk to each other through the API
• spend a little more time on Google and Github to see if this has already been solved

Because I’m not fluent in Java, much of this felt like a trip down the rabbit hole and I was already shaving a Yak with trying to get this supposedly quick hack up. Yet, what I did was the simplest thing I could think of to get going.

Anyway, I finally set up a fake git repo and ignored that material I setup to point to it. First setting up Git: initializing a repo, creating a bare repo, cloning the initialized repo into the bare repo and configuring the bare repo as a material in Go. Then on the Stage config there is an option for “Fetch Materials”. Go will only do material updates and checkouts if this is checked, so I unchecked it. On the Material config there is an option for “Poll for new changes”. This will stop Go from polling the material for changes, but you still have to set one up. It has to be a valid material. You can’t just put “myfakegitrepo” in the URL, I tried… it failed.

So, although you can’t get away with not using a material you can make the material insignificant after it is setup. I hope this doesn’t help anyone, if it does you are probably doing something complex and wrong like me.