We are running a GitLab with CI and want to deploy our application onto a Windows server. This will be just a demo system so we are quite open how we run the app later.
Currently we build and test the application. Now we need to stop the old app at the server, bring the new build onto server and start the new app.
I want to use at best the tools from GitLab but this isn't a must and as you can assume I am not so used to GitLab Deploy stuff.
Docker would be also an option.
Do you have some ideas?
Thank you
Nico
If you aren’t precious about the actual deployment of your web app then the easiest thing to do would just be install a gitlab runner on your test windows host. You should use a shell runner, so it can operate as a “fake user”. You’ll also need to ensure the user the runner is installed as has the right creds to install your app.
Tag this runner so it will run for a particular job, then within your gitlab ci you can take a copy of your build as an artifact (see gitlab ci artifacts).
Artifacts are automatically copied between runners so long as they are within the same pipeline run so you will have accsess to your built web app and can then install it how you like.
Related
We have a locally deployed instance of Gitlab, where at the time we cannot afford to have a GitLab Runner to run CI/CD pipelines.
Is it possible to use GitLab Pages without CI/CD? E.g. is it possible to manually prepare the HTML-content, put it in the public folder in the root and make it accessible?
I assume you don't want to use GitLab shared runner which costs you and CI minutes limits.
Public folder
Refer to this gitlab-ci.yaml for making HTML content available https://gitlab.com/pages/plain-html/-/blob/master/.gitlab-ci.yml
Running locally without registration
Here is the known limitations: https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/commands/#limitations-of-gitlab-runner-exec
Pages are directly managed by Gitlab so running locally won't affect the page's state.
Use your own runner and register with gitlab (Possible)
Install GitLab runner on your machine and register as a runner, instructions can be found at Settings->CI/CD->Runners->Specific runner Enable it for your project or group.
I use my personal machine gitlab-runner to execute CI jobs that aren't counted towards CI minutes.
We have a new project in which we are trying to make use of the built in continuous integration in Kentico for tracking changes to templates, page types, transformations etc.
We have managed to get this working locally between two instances of a Kentico database, making changes in one, syncing the changes through CI and then restoring them up to the second database using the Continuous integration application that sits in the bin folder in the Kentico site.
The issue we are having is when it comes to deploying our changes to our dev and live environments.
Our sites are hosted as Azure App services and we deploy to them using VSTS (Azure DevOps) build and release workflows however, as these tasks run in an agent, any powershell script we try to run to trigger the CI application fails because it is not running in the site / server context.
My question is, has anyone managed to successfully run Kentico CI in the context of an Azure app service? Alternatively, how can I trigger a powershell script on the site following a deployment?
Yes, I've got this running in Azure DevOps within the release pipeline itself. It's something that we're currently rolling out as a business where I work.
The key steps to getting this working for me were as follows:
I don't want to deploy the ContinuousIntegration.exe or the repository folders, so I need to create a second artefact set from source control (this is only possible at the moment with Azure Repos and GitHub to my knowledge).
Unzip your deployment package and copy the CMS folder to a working directory, this is where you're going to run CI. I did this because I need the built assemblies available.
From the repo artefact in step 1, copy the ContinuousIntegration.exe and CI repository folders into the correct place in your unzipped working folder.
Ensure that the connection string actually works for the DB in your unzipped folder, if necessary, you may want to change your VS build options in regards to how the web.config is handled.
From here, you should be able to run CI in the new working folder against your target database.
In my instance, as I don't have CI running on the target site it means that everything is restored every time.
I'm in to process of writing this up in more detail, so I'll share here when I've done that.
Edit:
- I finally wrote this up in more detail: https://www.ridgeway.com/blog/web-development/using-kentico-12-mvc-with-azure-devops
We do, but no CI. VSTS + GIT. We store virtual objects in the file system and using git for version control. We have our own custom library that does import export of the Kentico objects (the ones are not controlled by Git).Essentially we have a json file "publishing manifest" where we specify what objects need to be exported (i.e. moved between environments).
There is a step from Microsoft 'Powershell on Target Machines', you guess you can look into that.
P.S. Take a look also at Three Ways to Manage Data in Kentico Using PowerShell
Deploy your CI files to the Azure App Service, and then use a Azure Job to run "ContinuousIntegration.exe"
If you place a file called KenticoCI.bat in the directory \App_Data\jobs\triggered\ContinuousIntegration - this will automatically create a web job that you can can trigger:
KenticoCI.bat
cd D:\home\site\wwwroot
ren App_Offline.bak App_Offline.htm
rem # run Kentico CI Integraton
cd D:\home\site\wwwroot\bin
ContinuousIntegration.exe -r
rem # Removes the 'App_Offline.htm' file to bring the site back online
cd D:\home\site\wwwroot
ren App_Offline.htm App_Offline.bak
I think I'm fundamentally missing something. I'm new to CI/CD and trying to set up my first pipeline ever with gitlab.
The project is a pre-existing PHP project.
I don't want to clean it up just yet, at the moment I've pushed the whole thing into a docker container and it's running fine talking to google cloud's mysql databases etc as it should locally and also on a remote google cloud testing VM.
The dream is to be able to push to the development branch, and then merge the dev banch into the test branch which then TRIGGERS automated tests (easy part), and also causes the remote test VM (hosted on google cloud), to PULL the newest changes, rebuild the image from the latest docker file (or pull the latest image from gitlab image register)... and then rebuild the container with the newest image.
I'm playing around with gitlab's runner but I'm not understanding what it's actually for, despite looking through almost all the online content for it.
Do I just install it in the google cloud VM, and then when I push to gitlab from my development machine.. the repo will 'signal' the runner (which is running on the VM, to execute a bunch of scripts (which might include git pull on the newest changes?).
Because I already pre-package my app into a container locally (and push the image to the image registry) do I need to use docker as my executor on the runner? or can i just use shell and shell the commands in?
What am I missing?
TLDR and extra:
Questions:
What is runner actually for,
where is it meant to be installed?
Does it care which directory it is run in?
If it doesn't care which directory it's run,
where does it execute it's script commands? At root?
If I am locally building my own images and uploading them to gitlab's registry,
Do I need to set my executor to docker? Shouldn't I just set it to shell, pull the image, and build it? (Assuming the runner is runing on the remote VM).
What is runner actually for?
You have your project along with a .gitlab-ci.yml file. .gitlab-ci.yml defines what stages your CI/CD pipeline has and what to do in each stage. This typically consists of a build,test,deploy stages. Within each stage you can define multiple job. For example in build stage you may have 3 jobs to build on debian, centos and windows (in GitLab glossary build:debian, build:centos, build:windows). A GitLab runner clones the project read the gitlab-ci.yaml file and do what he is instructed to do. So basically GitLab runner is a Golang process that executes some instructed tasks.
where is it meant to be installed?
You can install a runner in your desired environment listed here. https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/install/
or
you can use a shared runner that is already installed on GitLab's infrastructure.
Does it care which directory it is run in?
Yes. Every task executed by runner is relativly to CI_PROJECT_DIR defined in https://gitlab.com/help/ci/variables/README. But you can alter this behaviour.
where does it execute it's script commands? At root?
Do I need to set my executor to docker? Shouldn't I just set it to shell, pull the image, and build it?
A runner can have mutiple executors such as docker, shell, virtualbox etc but docker being the most common one. If you use docker as the executor you can pull any image from docker hub or your configured registry and you can do loads of stff with docker images. In a docker environment normally you run them as the root user.
https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/executors/README.html
See gitlab access logs , runner is constantly polling the server
I'd like to run a grunt command to build my html pages after cloning/pulling my code into my App Service webapp.
Doing it manually is one thing (better than nothing), but ideally I could run it automatically. Right now I have a git hook configured to deploy the code to my app service when pushing to a specific branch. This won't update my page unless I can run my grunt command. I can't figure out how to run a script or custom command that would allow me to do this.
How can I do this?
Per my understanding, I assumed that you could leverage Continuous Deployment to Azure App Service and build your custom deployment script for running grunt command. Here are some tutorials, you could refer to them:
Kudu development
Kudu development hooks
Grunt
Additionally, here is a similar issue about deployment script, you could refer to it.
I'am looking for a simple and straightforward way to deploy a node application from the repo service (bitbucket or gitlab) to a separate server/vps.
I want to proceed so that a push to the repo would trigger a deploy on the server (one for a staging environment and one for production) When initially looking into this I get uncertain on what would be best, easiest, most efficient, best practice and so on. What tools should I pick, a gitlab runner or is it possible with pm2, some webhook or some other node npm service that could be installed on the vps for this? Any suggestions or links to further info would be appreciated.
I would suggest you trying CI/CD tool like Jenkins, but I needs to be run separately.
You can set cron at Jenkins to check repo changes, it's the easiest way. Better way would be using webhooks like Bitbucket Webhook Jenkins addon. Here is setup guide for Gitlab.
Jenkins installation guide