How We Deliver Features to Pinners

Previously we discussed what tools Pinterest uses for deploys.  This article shows how we connect them to create a “pipeline.”

In practice, Pinterest is a continuous delivery shop.  That means at any given time we can serve the latest code our engineers have deemed ready.  In practical terms that means we can create features and fix bugs and deliver them to pinners in the same day if not within the same hour.

Here’s our build pipeline from the inception of a change to being served in production.

1. An engineer makes a git branch.
2. She pushes it to her fork in Github Enterprise and submits a Pull Request.
3. Jenkins runs automated tests against her pull request (for services in our main repository).  To facilitate this we use a lightweight web app called Leeroy.
4. After the request is approved it is merged (by the original engineer).
5. The newly integrated master branch triggers a Jenkins job that runs the same automated tests in step 3.
6. Upon success of the aforementioned job, we have a build task that concats and minifies assets, pulls in translations and creates a tarball of the files and pushes it into S3.  We also branch this build in git as jenkins-stable.
7. Some systems are automatically deployed to (e.g. an internal “bleeding edge” version of the site).
8. For other services, a deploy is then manually initiated.  We usually choose the same build that is currently jenkins-stable, but we can choose anything available in S3.

There is a potential for redundancy in step 5.  The branch we happen to test may potentially be merged cleanly onto “main” thus avoiding the need for testing of integrated code.

Currently in this pipeline, running our automated tests is the slowest step.