Build, distribute and run binaries using GitHub

In this example we show how to use GitHub to deploy a binary file to your fleet of Raspberry Pis. The specific binary is written in go. The process starts by pushing the changes of your source code to your GitHub repository. Then, using GitHub actions, your source code is cross compiled for your Raspberry Pi and finally the binary is placed into your qbee.io file manager. From there on you can distribute and run it on the group of devices you have specified.

If we want to build an executable (called hi-pi) for our Raspberry Pi we can use the following code

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    fmt.Println("Hello Norway")
}

we can easily do that locally using

   $ env GOARCH=arm GOOS=linux go build -o hi-pi main.go

However, we aim to setup an automatic workflow, where we

• use git as for version control management
• setup a GitHub runner (using GitHub actions) to build our code once a push is triggered
• copy the created binary to the qbee.io file manager via API calls
• use the qbee.io file distribution to distribute (and run) the executable on a list of devices

Once a repository is set up, before creating a runner you need to set up GitHub secrets as shown in the following screenshot.

There we specify our qbee.io username with USERNAME_KEY and our password with PASSWORD_KEY, as we do not want them to be exposed.

After the passwords are defined we start GitHub actions which executes the YAML file on the runners on GitHub (or you can use a custom runner). GitHub actions are created under "set up a workflow yourself".

This is the script:

name: Go package distribution

on:
push:
    branches: [ master ]
pull_request:
    branches: [ master ]

jobs:


build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    env:
        APPNAME: hi-pi

    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2

    - name: create go executable
      env:
        GOARCH: arm
        GOOS: linux
      run: go build -o $APPNAME main.go

    - name: qbee.io authentication
      uses: qbee-io/authenticate-action@v1
      id: qbee-auth
      with:
        login: ${{ secrets.USERNAME_KEY }}
        password: ${{ secrets.PASSWORD_KEY }}

    - name: qbee.io file upload
      uses: qbee-io/file-upload-action@v1
      with:
        token: ${{ steps.qbee-auth.outputs.token }}
        filename: ${{ env.APPNAME }}
        qbee_directory: '/'
        local_directory: '.'

Note that your credentials aren't revealed as we use GitHub secrets to encrypt them as you can see in the action output

Finally, we distribute our files to the remote devices as usual with the standard file distribution.