Gitlab-Ci

This post describes how I’m using semantic-release on gitlab-ci to manage versioning automatically for different kinds of projects following a simple workflow (a develop branch where changes are added or merged to test new versions, a temporary release/#.#.# to generate the release candidate versions and a main branch where the final versions are published). What is semantic-releaseIt is a Node.js application designed to manage project versioning information on Git Repositories using a Continuous integration system (in this post we will use gitlab-ci) How does it workBy default semantic-release uses semver for versioning (release versions use the format MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH) and commit messages are parsed to determine the next version number to publish. If after analyzing the commits the version number has to be changed, the command updates the files we tell it to (i.e. the package.json file for nodejs projects and possibly a CHANGELOG.md file), creates a new commit with the changed files, creates a tag with the new version and pushes the changes to the repository. When running on a CI/CD system we usually generate the artifacts related to a release (a package, a container image, etc.) from the tag, as it includes the right version number and usually has passed all the required tests (it is a good idea to run the tests again in any case, as someone could create a tag manually or we could run extra jobs when building the final assets …​ if they fail it is not a big issue anyway, numbers are cheap and infinite, so we can skip releases if needed). Commit messages and versioningThe commit messages must follow a known format, the default module used to analyze them uses the angular git commit guidelines, but I prefer the conventional commits one, mainly because it’s a lot easier to use when you want to update the MAJOR version. The commit message format used must be: <type>(optional scope): <description> [optional body] [optional footer(s)]...

This post describes how to define and use rule templates with semantic names using extends or !reference tags, how to define manual jobs using the same templates and how to use gitlab-ci inputs as macros to give names to regular expressions used by rules. Basic rule templatesI keep my templates in a rules.yml file stored on a common repository used from different projects as I mentioned on my previous post, but they can be defined anywhere, the important thing is that the files that need them include their definition somehow. The first version of my rules.yml file was as follows: .rules_common: # Common rules; we include them from others instead of forcing a workflow rules: # Disable branch pipelines while there is an open merge request from it - if: >- $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH && $CI_OPEN_MERGE_REQUESTS && $CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE != "merge_request_event" when: never .rules_default: # Default rules, we need to add the when: on_success to make things work rules: - !reference [.rules_common, rules] - when: on_success...

This post describes how to handle files that are used as assets by jobs and pipelines defined on a common gitlab-ci repository when we include those definitions from a different project. Problem descriptionWhen a .giltlab-ci.yml file includes files from a different repository its contents are expanded and the resulting code is the same as the one generated when the included files are local to the repository. In fact, even when the remote files include other files everything works right, as they are also expanded (see the description of how included files are merged for a complete explanation), allowing us to organise the common repository as we want. As an example, suppose that we have the following script on the assets/ folder of the common repository: dumb.sh #!/bin/sh echo "The script arguments are: '$@'" If we run the following job on the common repository: job: script: - $CI_PROJECT_DIR/assets/dumb.sh ARG1 ARG2...