Configure cTMS in combination with CHARM and CI/CD

[WouterLemaire]

Introduction

The BTP Cloud Transport Management Service (cTMS) is mostly used in combination with the CI/CD service (or any other non-SAP CI/CD tool) when you need to transport applications from one Sub Account to another Sub Account. This combination is well documented in the SAP help documentation. CI/CD deploys to your DEV Sub Account and uploads the MTAR of your application to cTMS. From here, cTMS taks over to deploy to ACC and PRD Sub Accounts. You can find the details in the documentation here:

https://help.sap.com/docs/continuous-integration-and-delivery/sap-continuous-integration-and-deliver...

 

Besides integration with CI/CD, you want to integrate cTMS with your existing transporting system, which is for most customers Charm. This setup allows you to transport ABAP objects and BTP applications together. You could also consider using ALM as transporting system but at the moment this has not all the functionalities that you have in Charm today.

Connecting cTMS nodes to Charm require enabling the configuration “Controlled By SAP Solution Manager”:

When you enable this, you might face some of the problems listed below and the solution might might be helping you to have a clean cTMS landscape integrated with Charm.

Problems

• DEV node in cTMS without destination cannot be saved

• Setting a destination doesn’t make sense as the CI/CD service already deploys to the DEV Sub Account but it allows you to continue with the configuration. 
• The flow described for Cloud ALM cannot be applied exactly the same way when using Charm as it does not require to enable “Controlled by SAP Solution Manager”, see documentation. 
  • https://help.sap.com/docs/cloud-alm/setup-administration/cloud-transport-management

• All cTMS Nodes after DEV need to be controller by SAP Solution Manager if you want to integrate it with Charm BUT import to cTMS Nodes “Controlled By SAP Solution Manager” is not possible. This will cause an error in the logs of cTMS 

• Uploading to the DEV Node in cTMS only forwards to ACC after successful import. Importing/Deploying to DEV via cTMS is not needed as this is already done by the CI/CD service
  • This is only causing overhead which is not needed

• This means that you need to upload to cTMS Node for ACC BTP Sub Account BUT this is not possible because it is controlled by SAP Solution Manager

Solution

• Make the DEV nodea Virtual Node
• In SAP CI/CD, use export from “DEV-NODE” instead of "Upload to":
  • This will upload the mtar to cTMS and immediately forward it from DEV to ACC so it ends up in the queue of ACC.

• In any other CI/CD tool, use the export api: “/v2/nodes/export”
  • https://api.sap.com/api/TMS_v2/path/NODE_EXPORT_BY_NAME_V2
  • See blog post with an example: https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blogs-by-members/integrate-ci-cd-with-ctms-as-part-of-sap-cl... 

In the end, DEV is a virtual node and all others are controlled by Solution Manager

Configuration of the DEV Node:

• Upload to Node is allowed
• Node is flagged as a virtual node

Configuration of all nodes after DEV:

• “Conntrolled By SAP Solution Manager” enabled

Overview

In the end, your transport landscape with CI/CD, cTMS and Charm will look like this:

• Developers will push their code from BAS or VSCode to GIT
• GIT will trigger CI/CD through a webhook
• CI/CD will
  • deploy to the DEV Sub Account
  • export to cTMS dev node
• cTMS will move the transport to the queue of ACC
• From here it can be transported using Charm

I used a separate Sub Account for the CI/CD service but this could be as well in the DEV Sub Account.

For the integration with Charm I recommend following this blog post: https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blogs-by-sap/how-to-use-the-integration-of-sap-cloud-platfor...