I wanted to move away from using webhooks to control my deployment. I didn’t really like the idea of having to run a server just to listen for deployments. Plus it meant I had some deployment scripts sitting on my server and not in source control which I really didn’t like.

I know I shouldn’t have been but I was surprised with how easy it was to get it set up and running¹. Install the runner, make a couple of changes to the .gitlab-ci.yml file and I was up and running.

Setting up the Runner

I used the GitLab instructions for configuring the runner. The only change I made was to the /etc/gitlab-runner/config.toml file to enable checking out to a specific directory².

concurrent = 1
check_interval = 0

[session_server]
  session_timeout = 1800

[[runners]]
  name = "www.aselford.dev"
  url = "https://gitlab.com/"
  token = "yRTZzdV-5FHnMwcyiRyn"
  executor = "shell"
  [runners.custom_build_dir]
    enabled = true
  [runners.cache]
    [runners.cache.s3]
    [runners.cache.gcs]

GitLab CI Config

My deployment steps for staging are shown below.

Deploy_Staging:
  stage: deploy
  # Only run on my self-hosted staging runner
  tags:
    - self-hosted
    - staging
  variables:
    DOCKER_HOST: ""
    DOCKER_TLS_CERTDIR: ""
    # GIT_CLONE_PATH is not required anymore
    GIT_CLONE_PATH: $CI_BUILDS_DIR/dev-blog
    IMAGE_TAG: $DEV_IMAGE_TAG
  script:
    - docker pull $DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME:$IMAGE_TAG
    - docker stack deploy --compose-file docker-compose-dev.yml devblog
  environment:
    name: Staging
  only:
    - develop

I’m currently using Docker Swarm for deployments as a lightweight way to get rolling updates. I would like to move to Kubernetes but the extra overhead on my small VPS was not going to work.

Using GitLab runners also means I know the deployment has actually finished and worked. Previously when using webhooks I just had to assume the deployment had worked.

I’ve also got distracted again about hosting my images somewhere other than in my git repo. I still haven’t written my watch app…