GitLab-CI first try, 2 issues

GitLab CI/CD
1

Hi all,
i am totally new to CI, decided to try it actually just to build a small cortex-m4 firmware.
Found some examples, using “dind”, and not sure if it’s the right way, but at least this solution seems not requiring to install anything on a server.

Issues i am having now are:

  1. once docker in docker is executed (docker run) gitlab project files are located in /builds/spectrum70/zion-firmware but seems i can access them only after a “ls -al /”
    (so have to do something like docker run image ls -al /; /builds/spectrum70/zion-firmware/script.sh), otherwise i get a file not found. This seems strange.
  2. even if make command should be installed in the final docker, seems it’s not there
    /builds/spectrum70/zion-firmware/scripts/test.sh: line 13: make: not found

Every help really appreciated. Thanks !

You can check dockerfile and https://gitlab.com/spectrum70/zion-firmware/-/blob/master/.gitlab-ci.yml
Job error;
(https://gitlab.com/spectrum70/zion-firmware/-/jobs/558305471)

Regards,
angelo

2

Hi,

interesting project :slight_smile: Can you share which example you’ve used to chime into GitLab CI/CD? I’m curious on the recommendations.

Looking into the job output, it mentions the error. make is a build tool the container must provide. This is not the case for the DinD container.

I’m wondering about the steps you have taken thus far, this commit adds a Docker image build:

The missing make can be fixed with adding it into the dind container, but imho this script gets executed in the wrong place.

build:
  stage: build
  script:
    - docker build -t $IMAGE_TAG .
    - apk add make 
    - docker run -v "$MOUNT_POINT:/mnt" $IMAGE_TAG /mnt/scripts/test.sh
    - docker push $IMAGE_TAG

The build and clean steps should happen in a new container which is is run from the previous build. Took me a while to figure out what the content of test.sh is actually supposed to do.

cd /mnt/libc
make clean
make

cd ../lib
make clean
make

cd ../thermo
make clean
make

CI/CD Pipeline

At that point I had forked the repository already, and have been playing around. Long story short:

  • 2 stages are needed:
    • First, build the container image and push it to the registry
    • Second, pull the image and run a container with it, build the source in there
  • The path logic with cd inside the build script needed fixes. I’ve also renamed test.sh into build.sh to have a better name.
  • The generated artifacts were not uploaded, I have now added an example for thermo/*.bin. Reverse engineering Makefiles is not fun :wink:

I’ve fixed the CI/CD pipeline and made it work. You just need to look into the merge request and merge it then :slight_smile:

And while at it, I have blogged about my analysis and how I did go there. Hope it helps!

Cheers,
Michael

3

Hi Michael,

really thanks a lot for the help and the time you spent on solving this. I have read your reply now, and i already could solve the issues, but checking now your way, likely, more correct way to do the things.

Thanks,
Angelo

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