28/01/2019 Continuous Integration in Gitlab CI/CD with Drupal 8

Continuous Integration in Gitlab

CI/CD with Drupal 8
A tutorial showing you how to set up continuous
integration in Gitlab CI/CD to automate your tests
and builds.

ADCI Solutions Follow
Nov 6, 2018 · 5 min read

By ADCI Solutions

A release of new versions of programming software is fraught with

considerable di culties — there always may be unexpected errors in
the process of deploying a web application to the environment which
leads to a non-working application in production. To help minimize
these risks, the continuous deployment methodology is used. The basis
of continuous is the deployment pipeline, which allows us to
automate testing and deployment of the application, thereby increasing
the speed of the deployment and reducing the risks in a process of
releasing a new version.

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If you are using the Gitlab platform for your project, it already has a
built-in CI/CD support. Together with free private repositories, a bug
tracker, and other features, it makes the cloud-based service useful for
both storing code and also for testing and deploying. You can also learn
how to use the Gitlab pages service for your project documentation in
one of our previous articles.

In this article, we will look at the con guration of the pipeline using
Gitlab, con gure necessary les, learn how to build application and run
unit tests on a separate docker image, as well as automatically send the
built application to a staging or production server. And all of this we
can do just using a couple of lines in the con guration le! Sounds
interesting? Let’s start!

. . .

Con guring GitLab continuous delivery
First of all, you need 3 things to start using Gitlab CI:

1. The working instance of gitlab or gitlab.com.

2. The con guration le with the description of the pipeline  .gitlab-

ci.yml in the root directory of your project.

3. The con gured gitlab task runner, which executes the commands
described in the pipeline.

Gitlab Runner is the project that is used for execution of jobs described
in the  .gitlab-ci.yml le and also it communicates with Gitlab using
its own API.

In addition to installing our own runner on a custom hosting, you can

use ready shared runners hosted on Digital Ocean. To do this, on a
Gitlab project page go to settings-CI/CD-runner settings-enable shared
runners in the settings of your project. There you can also nd the
documentation on installing your own runner on a dedicated server.

After we’ve nished with the runner, let’s take a closer look at the
deployment process. The pipeline of Gitlab consists of several stages, by
default it is build, test, and deploy, each of them consists of 1 or more
CI jobs. Jobs in Gitlab are independent tasks that can be performed in
parallel. After completing all the jobs at one stage, the runner starts to
execute the next stage.

. . .

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28/01/2019 Continuous Integration in Gitlab CI/CD with Drupal 8

Build and test stage
Let’s create the  .gitlab-ci.yml le in the root of the project and
specify our custom stages:

1 stages:
2 - build
3 - deploy

For the build stage, we create a build job that installs our Drupal 8
project vendor dependencies using Сomposer and launch our custom
tests.

To do this, we need to specify a Docker image for the Gitlab runner,

for the brevity we will use the tetraweb/php image which already
contains the installed PHP and Node.js in this example.

1 build:
2 stage: build
3 image: tetraweb/php:7.1

We can also specify several jobs with di erent versions of PHP and test
our application for di erent versions.

In the before_script: section which is performed before the main

script execution, we install Composer and necessary packages.

1 before_script:
2 - apt-get update
3
4 #install additional gd extension, that is required b
5 - apt-get install libpng-dev -y
6 - docker-php-ext-install gd
7
8 #install composer
9 - apt-get install zip unzip
10 - php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer',
11 php composer setup php

Now after we have installed Сomposer, in the script section we run the
building of our project.

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1 script:
2 - php composer.phar install
3
4 #remove unnecessary files
f i

After the successful completion of the job, we can attach resulting les
to it, this is called an artifact.

For the artifact, we can specify its name, duration of storage and other
settings, as well as a list of les to be added.

{CI_COMMIT_SHA} is a built-in placeholder, in the future, we will also be

able to de ne our own constants.

1 artifacts:
2 name: "test_project_{CI_COMMIT_SHA}"
3 expire_in: '1 week'
4 paths:

In case we want to run the job only for commits from a speci c branch,
you can specify it in the section directive ‘only’.

1 only:
2 - master

In the end, our con g le will look like this:

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1 build:
2 stage: build
3 image: tetraweb/php:7.1
4
5 before_script:
6 - apt-get update
7
8 #install additional gd extension, that is required b
9 - apt-get install libpng-dev -y
10 - docker-php-ext-install gd
11
12 #install composer
13 - apt-get install zip unzip
14 - php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer',
15 - php composer-setup.php
16 - php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"
17
18 #install composer package to run parallel tasks
19 - composer -n global require -n "hirak/prestissimo"
20
21 script:
22 - php composer.phar install

If we want to run a unit test for the built application, let’s add the
following line to the end of the script directive:

1 # run phpunit tests

2 - ../web/vendor/bin/phpunit -c core --group our_tes

—-testsuite = unit ag indicates that we are running unit tests only,

which do not require the installed Drupal.

So, after pushing the con guration le into the master branch of your
repository, go to the CI/CD-pipelines at the project page and you will
see that our task runner automatically began to perform the pipeline. If
we do not want to run it automatically, we can add the following
directive.

1 when: manual

i i ❤ i view raw

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28/01/2019 Continuous Integration in Gitlab CI/CD with Drupal 8

If the job is nished without errors, we can download the resulting

artifact.

. . .

Deploy stage
Okay, we’ve installed dependencies for our application and have run
out some of the unit tests, let’s try to deploy it into the stage
environment, for example, for the user acceptance testing.

We need to create a new deploy_stage job, which is related to the

stage deploy, that we declared above.

First, we need to create a variable inside of Gitlab where we will store a

private ssh key for access to our server. Go to the settings-CI/CD-secret
variables and enter necessary values.

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1 deploy_dev:
2 stage: deploy
3 environment:
4 name: dev
5 only:
6 - master
7 image: tetraweb/php:7.1
8 before_script:
9 #install ssh agent
10 - 'which ssh-agent || ( apt-get update -y && apt-get
11 - mkdir -p ~/.ssh
12 - eval $(ssh-agent -s)
13 - '[[ -f /.dockerenv ]] && echo -e "Host *\n\tStrict
14
15
16 script:
17 - ssh-add <(echo "$STAGING_KEY")
18 - ssh -p22 server_user@server_host " <<EOF
19 - cd /var/www/html/my-drupal-site/web/
20 - drush sql:dump --result-file=../../backups/${CI_B
21 - mkdir /var/www/html/_tmp
22 - EOF

In this script, we’ve installed the ssh-agent on the Docker container and
disabled StrictHostKeyChecking in the ssh con gs in the
before_script block. After that, we can log in to the stage
environment server via the ssh.

There are several ways to copy project les to the server, in this case, we
copy them to the tmp folder via SCP, then we replace the folders and
move the con g le settings.env.php to the working directory. We
also created a backup of a database, ran import of the Drupal con g
les and database updates.

. . .

Afterword
In this article, we’ve learned how to use Gitlab CI/CD in our project and
wrote the necessary con g les. Of course, for the real project, you will
want to add more stages and jobs, this is just a very basic example how
to use this service. I hope you will start using a continuous delivery
approach in your project and make your deploy process easier.
. . .

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Originally posted at the ADCI Solutions website.

. . .

The author is Dmitry Romanovsky, Web Developer at ADCI

Solutions

Dmitry is famous for nding beautiful and optimized solutions to solve

a client’s problem. As a hobby Dmitry studies machine learning and
reads books. Also, in his spare time he watches TV series, listens to
music, and plays video games sometimes.

. . .

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