Building a package for testing

While developing a new feature or modifying an existing one, it is helpful if an installable package (or a Docker image) containing those changes is available for testing. For this very purpose, a manual job is provided in the GitLab CI/CD pipeline that can be used to trigger a pipeline in the Omnibus GitLab repository that will create:

  • A deb package for Ubuntu 16.04, available as a build artifact, and
  • A Docker image, which is pushed to the Omnibus GitLab container registry (images titled gitlab-ce and gitlab-ee respectively and image tag is the commit which triggered the pipeline).

When you push a commit to either the GitLab CE or GitLab EE project, the pipeline for that commit will have a trigger-omnibus job in the qa stage you can trigger manually (if it didn’t trigger already).

Trigger omnibus QA job

After the child pipeline started, you can select trigger-omnibus to go to the child pipeline named TRIGGERED_EE_PIPELINE.

Triggered child pipeline

Next, select the Trigger:package job in the trigger-package stage.

The Trigger:package job when finished will upload its artifacts to GitLab, and then you can Browse them and download the .deb file or you can use the GitLab API to download the file straight to your VM. Keep in mind the expiry of these artifacts is short, so they will be deleted automatically within a day or so.

Specifying versions of components

If you want to create a package from a specific branch, commit or tag of any of the GitLab components (like GitLab Workhorse, Gitaly, or GitLab Pages), you can specify the branch name, commit SHA or tag in the component’s respective *_VERSION file. For example, if you want to build a package that uses the branch 0-1-stable, modify the content of GITALY_SERVER_VERSION to 0-1-stable and push the commit. This will create a manual job that can be used to trigger the build.

Specifying the branch in Omnibus GitLab repository

In scenarios where a configuration change is to be introduced and Omnibus GitLab repository already has the necessary changes in a specific branch, you can build a package against that branch through a CI/CD variable named OMNIBUS_BRANCH. To do this, specify that variable with the name of the branch as value in .gitlab-ci.yml and push a commit. This will create a manual job that can be used to trigger the build.