Gitlab Runners as Containers

GitLab CI/CD
1

Hello everyone,
i am trying out the CI/CD pipeline of Gitlab (i don’t have experience of DevOps but it’s something that is needed in the company i am employed of). I have created a runner as “docker” (using a docker image of Gradle) and i have pushed a small java application to a new repository in Gitlab. My pipeline has only one job named “build”. The task of it is “gradle build”. The pipeline is successful but i don’t really know of how to extract the created .jar file from the build process. By extract i mean, how to copy the .jar file to the “outside world”. :slight_smile:

Can anyone please explain to me the process? Actually i am not looking for a walk-through. I want to understand how this works because in the future we are going to be creating more pipelines.

Best regards and thank you so much in advance.

2

Hi there, so you want something like this:

stages:
   - build

build:
    ...
    script:
       - gradle build
    artifacts:
        paths
            - myjarfile.jar
         expire_in: 2 weeks

And then once your pipeline has run, on your pipeline page you should see a label Actions near you pipeline, and a drop-down that will give you the option to download the file (or a zip archive containing the file).

1 Like
3

Hi @snim2,
thank you so much for your quick response! I have tried this but the reason as to “why” i want to copy the created .jar file outside of the build container is in order to package it to another container and publish it to a private docker registry. I am thinking that maybe i am way over my head with this one but i want to start learning about CI/CD.

Best regards.

4

Oh, in that case, you probably want to add another stage called package to do the next step, and then a publish stage. Artifacts should automatically be passed from one stage to another.

Do read through the GitLab docs they are quite readable and comprehensive, IMO!

5

Hi @snim2, thank you so much for the documentation link. One thing i cannot quite understand yet, is the fact that when i created the gitlab runner i “attached” the gradle docker image to it. How in my pipeline can add more images? I mean, maybe i should have attached a more “generic” linux image to it. How proper DevOps people are doing this?

Best regards.

6

When you created your runner, you added a default image to it. You can have use any number of images in your actual pipeline:

build:
    ...
    image: gradle:VERSION
    script:
       - gradle build
    artifacts:
        paths
            - myjarfile.jar
         expire_in: 2 weeks
1 Like
7

Oh! This means that no matter what kind of docker image i attach to the runner during the initial registration can be “overwritten” during the pipeline’s lifetime?

Best regards.

8

Yep, absolutely.