Welcome to QOps (Qlik Operations), a tool that helps to automate the development and deployment process of Qlik-based applications.
This brief tutorial will teach how to separate the source code of Qlik Applications from the data and how to build an automated pipeline based on CI/CD concept.
Methods Overview
QOps has 5 main commands that allow working with Qlik applications. All these commands work recursively with all subfolders starting with the current folder. To limit the number of applications processed QOps has flexible filter options. Global filtering settings may be configured with QOps-SetFilter command. Alternatively, the -Filter parameter may be used inside each command call, which overrides global settings.
To get started with QOps please check current Settings, which may be printed out with QOps-ShowDefault command.
Source Code Extraction
To extract the source code from Qlik Application, QOps has QOps-Prepare command. This command extracts sources from Qlik applications selected. Extracted Sources will be saved into -prj, -variables and -reduce folders, which names start within the application name.
Application Building
QOps builds Qlik Applications based on the sources extracted previously. For this QOps-Build command is used.
Git Integration
Integration with Git allows to use QOps for committing, pushing and pulling changes made in Qlik Applications to and from local or remote repositories. The following commands are getting used for this.
- QOps-Commit refreshes sources and commits them to the specified branch of the local Git repository.
- QOps-Push encapsulates both QOps-Prepare and QOps-Commit inside. Once all applications are processed, QOps makes a push to the remote repository.
- QOps-Pull retrieves source codes from the remote repository and then calls QOps-Build method for them.
Encapsulation of the QOps-Prepare and QOps-Build methods may be eliminated with -NoPrepare or -NoBuild flags.
Git connects to Git Providers using SSH or HTTP protocols for secure communication. SSH connection ([email protected]:git.user/remoterepo.git) requires SSH key pair generation and public key adding to the Server. HTTP connection (http://192.168.1.100/git.user/remoterepo.git) will ask for Username and Password and then will store it in Windows Credential Manager.
CI/CD pipeline
QOps receives commands in a batch mode also from installed and configured CI/CD runners. Select the appropriate remote repository service (GitLab, GitHub), install and configure CI/CD runner(s) provided. See the following instructions steps for that (GitLab Runners , GitHub Actions).
Include YAML script into the repository with the needed steps of QOps configuration, QOps commands for application building and publishing. In this way, an automated pipeline with steps of source fetching, application build and publishing on success will get.