ci-cd-quirks

name: ci-cd-quirks description: >- Non-obvious CI/CD details, environment quirks, and gotchas specific to tekton-tools. Use when the user is confused by CI behavior, asks about Konflux pipelines, Renovate, or needs to understand how the CI environment differs from expectations.

CI/CD Quirks

Primary CI Is Konflux, Not GitHub Actions

The real quality gate lives in .tekton/ (Pipelines-as-Code PipelineRuns running in a Konflux cluster). GitHub Actions (.github/workflows/) only does two things:

• lint.yaml -- validates AGENTS.md is under 300 lines
• fullsend.yaml -- dispatches the fullsend AI agent for PR review/triage

All linting, building, SAST, and task execution tests run in Konflux.

PAC Task Injection

PR pipelines can test uncommitted task changes from the PR branch using the pipelinesascode.tekton.dev/task annotation:

pipelinesascode.tekton.dev/task: tasks/rpms-signature-scan/0.2/rpms-signature-scan.yaml

This makes the task available as a local Task kind in the pipeline. The test-container-pull-request pipeline uses this to run the PR's version of rpms-signature-scan alongside the published catalog version -- both scan the same built image so you can compare behavior.

Dual rpms-signature-scan Execution

test-container-pull-request runs rpms-signature-scan twice:

1. local-rpms-signature-scan -- the PR branch version (via PAC injection above)
2. rpms-signature-scan -- the released catalog bundle from quay.io/konflux-ci/tekton-catalog/task-rpms-signature-scan:0.2@sha256:...

Both run against the freshly-built root container. This catches regressions where the PR's changes break something that the released version handles correctly.

Trusted-Artifacts Build Path

The task bundle build (rpms-signature-scan-v02-pull-request) uses the Konflux trusted-artifacts pipeline:

init → git-clone-oci-ta → prefetch-dependencies → tkn-bundle-oci-ta → build-image-index → SAST → apply-tags

The -oci-ta suffix means artifacts are passed via OCI rather than PVC workspaces. This is a Konflux-specific pattern -- you won't find these tasks in the upstream Tekton catalog.

Renovate Manages Image Digests

Renovate auto-updates container image digests in:

• tasks/rpms-signature-scan/0.2/**
• .tekton/**

Configured in renovate.json. Key implications:

• Do not manually update digests in those paths -- Renovate will overwrite them
• quay.io/konflux-ci/tools updates are scheduled "at any time" (no delay)
• If you need a new image version, either wait for Renovate or update the tag/digest and expect Renovate to open a follow-up PR later

Namespace and Service Accounts

All pipelines run in namespace konflux-vanguard-tenant with dedicated service accounts:

These are pre-provisioned in the Konflux tenant. You cannot run these pipelines outside that namespace without recreating the RBAC setup.

Test Images Are Pinned by Digest

The integration test pipeline (rpms-signature-scan-tests-pull-request) uses images from quay.io/vanguard_tests/ pinned by digest:

If these images are ever rebuilt or deleted, the integration tests will break. The digests are what matter -- the :latest tag is just for human readability.

kube-linter Comes from Tekton Catalog Git Resolver

The run-kubelint step in test-container-pull-request resolves the task from GitHub at runtime:

taskRef:
  resolver: git
  params:
  - name: url
    value: https://github.com/tektoncd/catalog.git
  - name: revision
    value: main
  - name: pathInRepo
    value: task/kube-linter/0.1/kube-linter.yaml

This means it always uses the latest main branch version. If the upstream task breaks, our CI breaks -- but this is rare.

Image Expiry on PR Builds

PR-built images have image-expires-after: 5d. They auto-delete from the registry after 5 days. Push builds (tagged with commit SHA) do not expire.

CEL Expressions for Triggers

Push pipelines use CEL expressions to conditionally trigger:

pipelinesascode.tekton.dev/on-cel-expression: >-
  event == "push" && target_branch == "main" && "tasks/rpms-signature-scan/0.2/***".pathChanged()

The rpms-signature-scan-v02-on-push only runs when files under the task directory actually change. It does NOT run on every push to main.

How Task Updates Reach build-definitions

The full release flow after merging to main:

1. Push pipeline (rpms-signature-scan-v02-on-push) builds the task bundle and pushes it to quay.io/redhat-user-workloads/.../rpms-signature-scan-v02:{commit-sha}
2. Release pipeline triggers automatically via a ReleasePlanAdmission (policy: tekton-bundle-standard). It pushes the bundle to the external registry: quay.io/konflux-ci/tekton-catalog/task-rpms-signature-scan with tags:
   • 0.2
   • 0.2-{git_sha}
   • 0.2-{oci_version}
   • {oci_version}
   • {oci_version}-{timestamp}
3. Renovate in konflux-ci/build-definitions detects the new digest and opens a PR to update external-task/rpms-signature-scan/0.2/rpms-signature-scan.yaml
4. Once that PR merges, the updated task is available in the build-definitions catalog

This is fully automated -- no manual sync is needed. The release pipeline uses push-tekton-task-bundles-to-external-registry from konflux-ci/release-service-catalog.