This is still in progress…

GitLab comes with Continuous Integration support. We do have to setup a Runner to run the CI job. Runner is basically a daemon that runs on a server that executes the CI job.

Setup Runner

GitLab supports Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS.
We will setup the runner on Ubuntu 16.04 server.
ssh into the server.

  • Add GitLab’s official repository via yum:
curl -L https://packages.gitlab.com/install/repositories/runner/gitlab-ci-multi-runner/script.deb.sh | sudo bash
  • Install gitlab-ci-multi-runner : 
sudo apt-get install gitlab-ci-multi-runner
  • Register the runner:
sudo gitlab-ci-multi-runner register

In order to use GitLab’s continuous integration, we have to

  1. add a .gitlab-ci.yml file to the root directory of the app
  2. configure the GitLab project to use a Runner.

After that each merge request or push triggers CI.

Creating .gitlab-ci.yml file

First make sure there is a .ruby-version file at the root of the app with the ruby version you want to use. 

touch .ruby-version
echo "2.3.1" > .ruby-version

Next, create .gitlab-ci.yml at the root of the rails app 

touch .gitlab-ci.yml

If you are using rspec for testing, update the above file with:

before_script:
  - rbenv install --skip-existing `cat .ruby-version`
  - bundle install
  - bundle exec rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=test

rspec:
  script:
    - bundle exec rspec
  tags:
    - ruby

If minitest is used, update as below:

before_script:
  - rbenv install --skip-existing `cat .ruby-version`
  - bundle install
  - bundle exec rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=test

test:
  script:
    - bundle exec rake test
  tags:
    - ruby

Configuring a Runner

Runners run the builds that are defined in .gitlab-ci.yml. Runner can be virtual machine, docker container etc.

Two steps are involved

  1. Install it
  2. Configure it