GitLab CI/CD Port

[MediJaster]

Hello,
I found this GitHub Action from the Dreams Of Code docker stack video and I really want to use this to deploy my application to replace my horrible and probably very insecure deploy script, but I am currently using GitLab CI/CD.

I did consider migrating my project entirely just to use this specific action but on second thought I preferred sticking to GitLab CI/CD when I looked at how limited organization features in GitHub are compared to GitLab.

I want to take a crack at this port myself (just the challenge was a big factor in not wanting to migrate to GitHub lol) but I am completely unexperienced when it comes to contributing to open source projects and I am unsure of what is the best way to perform this.

Not to mention that to perform a true and complete port I would also need to port the workflows of this repository too, at least everything except the codeberg mirror, so it would require your cssnr/update-version-tags-action@v1 action to be ported as well.

I am completely open to any suggestions and help on this matter and thank you for your time in reading this

[smashedr]

I use to use GitLab CI a long time ago, before GitHub offered free private repositories and I switched there. And as of this decade, I have fallen in love with Actions and not looked back.

Last time I did GitLab it was just a yaml file with run commands. GitHub actions is both the structured yaml, Workflows, but also custom steps, that can be run in custom docker images, with inputs.

I am not sure what GitLab offers today, but, this action is quite simple, and since it is a shell script, can maybe be done with run steps.

What this action does is this:

1. Establishes ssh key authentication by adding the provided key to the agent, or generating one and adding it to the remote host with sshpass and the provided password.
2. Create a remote docker context using the remote ssh connection and use that context for docker operations.
3. Deploy the stack as normal since it will deploy using the remote context (on the remote swarm host).
4. Cleanup the remote host authorized_key file if sshpass was used.

Let me know if you need more information...

[smashedr]

Looks like GitLab now supports Components, which seem to resemble GitHub Actions.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/components/

I bookmarked this link and will review it when I get some time.

But at a glance it seems to support everything necessary, just need to look into how to manage dependencies, like ssh, sshpass, etc...

[MediJaster]

This looks interesting! My original plan was to use the include functionality, which is mentioned in the components article, but having the possibility to publish this in the ci/cd catalog would be great!

[MediJaster]

I have created the repository on GitLab and I have already started the migration process. I am still trying to figure out the best practices for GitLab CI/CD components, since I want to publish this to the official CI/CD catalog at some point

Here's the link if you want to take a look:
https://gitlab.com/kujohosting/docker-stack-deploy

[smashedr]

Looking good. I am excited to see how it comes out... Keep me posted on the progress. 👍

While I won't be of much help with any of the GitLab settings, I can answer any questions you have about the script.

[MediJaster]

First of all, thanks to your discovery of components, I found a ready-made component for docker builds that is done really well by to-be-continuous: Docker. (Best name ever for ci/cd stuff lmao)
While searching for this component I also briefly saw that a component for docker compose also exists, made by the same team behind the docker build component, but this will be important later.

I managed to integrate another component to automatically publish my component on the CI/CD Catalog (inception intensifies), but I hit a roadblock where everything in my action made sense according to the documentation but when I tried using the component in a test repository it would just complain that the inputs were incorrect.

Today I thought that maybe I had some name clashes with the base GitLab CI/CD YAML configuration syntax, so I tried looking at the Docker Compose component I saw previously to look at how they were handling inputs like host, port etc. So I found out that they prefix everything with ssh- , but then I also find out that that component also supports docker stack, and it also does a lot more complex stuff like handling separate deployments to integration, staging and production environments.

I am still going to try fixing the component for fun, but I think I'll probably use that component instead.

Thank you for being awesome with this, as I said, this was my first experience writing open software and it was very fun.
I'll post a comment with links to both components to mark this discussion as answered

[MediJaster]

Thanks to @smashedr for finding the components feature of GitLab CI/CD!
I have found two very good components for docker:

Docker
Automatically build, test and scan docker containers

Docker Compose
Automatic deployments (to multiple, separate environments) with docker compose and docker stack