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What do I do if Kosli is down?

What do I do if Kosli is down? #

Customers use Kosli to attest evidence of their business and software processes. If Kosli is down, these attestations will fail. This will break CI workflow pipelines, blocking artifacts from being deployed. In this situation there is a built-in mechanism to instantly turn Kosli off and keep the pipelines flowing. When Kosli is back up, you can instantly turn Kosli back on.

Turning Kosli CLI calls on and off instantly #

If the KOSLI_DRY_RUN environment variable is set to true then all Kosli CLI commands will:

Not communicate with Kosli at all
Print the payload they would have sent
Exit with a zero status code

We recommend creating an Org-level KOSLI_DRY_RUN variable in your CI system and, in all CI workflows, ensuring there is an environment variable set from it.

For example, in a Github Action workflow:

name: Main
...
env:
  KOSLI_DRY_RUN: ${{ vars.KOSLI_DRY_RUN }}           # true iff Kosli is down

Turning Kosli API calls on and off instantly #

If you are using the Kosli API in your workflows (e.g. using curl), we recommend using the same Org-level KOSLI_DRY_RUN environment variable and guarding the curl call with a simple if statement. For example:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

kosli_curl()
{
  local URL="${1}"
  local JSON_PAYLOAD="${2}"

  if [ "${KOSLI_DRY_RUN:-}" == "true" ]; then
    echo KOSLI_DRY_RUN is set to true. This is the payload that would have been sent
    echo "${JSON_PAYLOAD}" | jq .
  else
    curl ... --data="${JSON_PAYLOAD}" "${URL}"
  fi
}