I am using gitlab pages to deploy outputs from the jobs. I have 3 different jobs which produce html outputs. One job always runs. 2 other jobs are optional, thus they are manually run.
How is possible to deploy outputs of the manual jobs into pages in this situation? Can two different pages job be defined in gitlab ci?
If you define two different pages in gitlab ci, the last entry will be seen as pages job. Therefore, you need to handle your work inside a single pages job.
Related
We have multiple runners that share a tag, and these tags can't be changed because of workplace policies. So we currently have something set up like this:
#12345 (Foo)
tag: foobar
#23456 (fOo)
tag: foobar
#34567 (foO)
tag: foobar
However when we run a job using the "foobar" tag, it sometimes fails solely depending on the runner that gets chosen. I ended up running the pipeline a dozen or so times to check, and runners #12345 and #23456 always end up failing, even when the build is fine. The #34567 runner succeeds when the build is fine and fails when the build isn't. The runner documentation says I can specify the runner by name, but looking over the keyword reference documentation I'm not seeing how to specify it.
It's not possible. The runners can only be selected by tags and runners with an identical tag should be homogeneous in terms of software versions and hardware. The fist one that is ready to take your CI job will run it.
So one should never need to select a specific runner, in a group that share a single tag.
Each job may known the runner executing it by looking at the environment variable CI_RUNNER_ID, but this is not usable for your purpose. Unless you force a job failure if the runner is not the "good" one, and retry it until it will be randomly taken by the runner you want. But of course this would be a weird solution.
No. The documentation is misleading. You can only use tags to limit what runner(s) your jobs run on.
The only other way you might have around this would be to register your own runner(s) for your project/group, giving them the tags you need. Though, I doubt that's an acceptable solution for obvious reasons.
Ultimately, your GitLab administrator will need to configure your runner(s) to have an additional tag by which you can uniquely identify the runner(s) if you want to be able to have your jobs use a specific runner out of your shared runner pool.
I'm using GitLab pipelines to run e2e tests on various physical machines (these machines are connected to the test hardware in a 1 to 1 relation). On each machine, a GitLab runner is installed. The pipeline consists of three major parts:
prepare the test hardware (deploy, configure)
execute the e2e tests (on the test hardware)
clean up the test hardware
Currently I'm doing all of this in one job, by using the before_script, script and after_script keywords. But I would like to use multiple jobs (or even stages) for this.
The problem I'm facing is, that I can't be sure that all jobs/stages are executed on the same runner. So it might happen, that the prepare step is executed on runner1 and the execute step is executed on runner2 (even in parallel), which obviously is not what I want. The preparation is more than just creating artifacts, therefore I can't simply give it to the next job.
Tags also seems not to solve this, because a tag can only be specified for one job, not for multiple, or the complete stage.
I understand that this is not the way how runners are used normally, but I still wonder if there is a way to achieve this.
Or can someone point out another approach to solve this?
I'm using GitLab Community Edition 14.3.2.
I think you have two options here for how you can split this up -
As sytech mentioned, you can tag each machine with machine-1, machine-2, etc, which will allow you to make your jobs sticky to each runner. Since you can use variables in runner tags, you could have a job at the start that checks which runner is not running tests, and sets RUNNER_TAG or something similar to that runner, so you don't have to hardcode your runner to a single box
You could not have the test boxes run the jobs directly (presumably you're using a shell runner to do this today), and use SSH or winRM to access the box directly, and modify it from there. Then the state of your runner doesn't matter at all. This is likely the "cleaner" way to do it, so your test boxes don't have to share resources or state with the runner
As far as I know TestCafe default behaviour is to run tests in parallel.
Indeed the browsers function accepts an array of browser (which is cool).
What I would like to do however is quite different. I have fixtures based on area of my portal (search, payment etc...) and so I'd like to know if it's possible to run these tests in CLI in parallel as they are orthogonal.
The scope is of course to improve the execution time as the number test
cases will grow.
On the other hand I'd like also to catch the failures meaning that if a test ran in parallel on a specific metadata filter fails possibly we would like to stop the others too.
I am not using TestCafe's docker but our custom one with just Firefox, Chrome installed and we launch of tests in headless mode.
As a last point a great thing would be if we could run these scenario/metadata in parallel but somehow at the end of the test suite gather the reports together.
I understand the question is not easy especially because it involves either TestCafe or GitlabCi but probably someone else faced this problem too.
Thank you
If I understand you correctly, the behavior you described can be achieved by dividing the test execution among multiple CI jobs. For example, each CI job can test a particular area of your portal. For that, run TestCafe with specified metadata of your fixture/test. Also, most of the CI systems allow you to cancel all other jobs in a pipeline if one of the jobs fails (unfortunately, Gitlab hasn't released this feature yet).
On the other hand, you can use TestCafe's programmatic API: create multiple TestCafe runners, each running the desired subset of tests. However, at the end of the test execution, you'll need to merge generated reports into one report manually. Check this answer to get an idea of how to create multiple runners.
New to Gitlab CI/CD.
What is the proper construct to use in my .gitlab-ci.yml file to ensure that my validation job runs only when a "real" checkin happens?
What I mean is, I observe that the moment I create a merge request, say—which of course creates a new branch—the CI/CD process runs. That is, the branch creation itself, despite the fact that no files have changed, causes the .gitlab-ci.yml file to be processed and pipelines to be kicked off.
Ideally I'd only want this sort of thing to happen when there is actually a change to a file, or a file addition, etc.—in common-sense terms, I don't want CI/CD running on silly operations that don't actually really change the state of the software under development.
I'm passably familiar with except and only, but these don't seem to be able to limit things the way I want. Am I missing a fundamental category or recipe?
I'm afraid what you ask is not possible within Gitlab CI.
There could be a way to use the CI_COMMIT_SHA predefined variable since that will be the same in your new branch compared to your source branch.
Still, the pipeline will run before it can determine or compare SHA's in a custom script or condition.
Gitlab runs pipelines for branches or tags, not commits. Pushing to a repo triggers a pipeline, branching is in fact pushing a change to the repo.
Does anyone know of a way to split a single Jenkins job into parts and run them concurrently/parallel?
For example if I have a job that runs tests which take 30 minutes, is there a way I can break this job into three 10 minute runs that run at the same time but in three different instances
Thanks in advance.
Create new jobs, call it f.e. Test . You should select the job type based on the type of the root job.
If you have a Maven Job type, you can set the workspace directory under build -> advanced. Freestyle Job type has this option directly under project -> advanced.
Set for all jobs the same working directory. The root job will compile and all other jobs uses the same working directory to use the compiled output.
For the test jobs add the test execution as build step and differ here the tests which should be executed.
Edit your root job and remove there the excution of the long running tests. You can call there the three jobs now. But you need the Parameterized Trigger Plugin.
The downside of this way, you need enough jenkins executors to handle all tests jobs.
If you're using Jenkins 1.x, I would suggest trying the multijob plugin - I've successfully used it to split a single job into a parent job plus multiple child jobs:
https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Multijob+Plugin
If you're using Jenkins 2.x, then try out the pipeline feature :) It makes running parallel tasks very easy:
https://github.com/jenkinsci/pipeline-plugin/blob/master/TUTORIAL.md#creating-multiple-threads
If you want, I believe you can also use pipelines in Jenkins 1.x by means of a plugin. I haven't looked into that, though.