Cloud Quickstart

This guide walks you through getting started with the Cloud edition of Snap CD, hosted by Schrieksoft at snapcd.io.

If you’d prefer to host the Server yourself, follow the Self-Hosted Quickstart instead.

Create a User Account

Create a free user account on snapcd.io.

Create an Organization

On your first login you will be asked to create an organization. Pick a unique name. Your user will automatically be set as an Owner on the organization.

Pick a Subscription

Snap CD Cloud requires a paid subscription. Seer the Pricing page for available editions.

(Optional) Invite Users to Your Organization

A single Snap CD user account can belong to any number of Organizations. You may invite new or existing users to join your organization and assign roles to them as needed. For example: you are the technical owner but someone else at your organization handles billing? Invite them and give them the SubscriptionManager role!

Get to Know the Basics

We provide extensive documentation on how to get the best out of Snap CD. Before you continue with the rest of this quickstart guide, please read the basics.

Start using the Terraform Provider

To start using the Terraform provider you must either:

  • Generate a personal access token for your (Organization.Owner) user via the snapcd.io portal.

OR

  • Create a Service Principal (via the snapcd.io portal) and grant it sufficient permissions (For getting started we recommend Organization.Owner).

Then configure the provider like this.

Register a Runner

To register a Runner you must:

  1. Create a Service Principal. You may do this via the portal at snapcd.io/ServicePrincipals. Pick a unique (within your organization) “Client ID” and set a “Client Secret”. This Service Principal does not need any additional role assignments.
  2. Create a Runner by associating your Service Principal. This can be done via the portal at snapcd.io/Runners. Make the Runner available to Modules within your organization by setting the is_assigned_to_all_modules flag to true. More granular assignment approaches are discussed here.

Deploy a Runner

Snap CD orchestrates all infrastructure deployments via Runners that you host yourself. This means that Snap CD never needs to gain direct access to any of your infrastructure; it is responsible only for configuration, orchestration, providing inputs, and storing outputs and logs.

The Runner lives alongside the Server in the schrieksoft/snapcd repo, under applications/snapcd/SnapCd.Runner/. Binaries are published as zip archives on GitHub Releases and official Docker images are published here (and an Azure-CLI-bundled flavour here).

The Runner can be deployed via any of the following reference repositories. Each is substrate-specific and contains a self-contained components/runner/ sub-deployment you can bring up on its own:

For the purposes of this guide we recommend using the Docker Compose approach.

The Runner needs to know which Server to connect to — for Cloud, this is the default https://snapcd.io, so no override is required.

Create a Stack

Create a Stack called “samples” via the portal at snapcd.io/Stacks. We’ll use this Stack for the sample project.

Create a Secret

Snap CD allows you to create Secrets that can be passed into Modules as inputs. Create a Secret on your “samples” Stack via the portal at snapcd.io/Stacks/samples?action=Secrets. Name the secret “quickstart-secret” and give it any text value.

Deploy the Sample Project

In order to see in practice what a typical Snap CD project might look like, deploy this sample project.

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