Using Dpl as a deployment tool All tiers All offerings
Dpl (pronounced like the letters D-P-L) is a deploy tool made for continuous deployment that’s developed and used by Travis CI, but can also be used with GitLab CI/CD.
Dpl can be used to deploy to any of the supported providers.
Prerequisite
To use Dpl you need at least Ruby 1.9.3 with ability to install gems.
Basic usage
Dpl can be installed on any machine with:
gem install dpl
This allows you to test all commands from your local terminal, rather than having to test it on a CI server.
If you don’t have Ruby installed you can do it on Debian-compatible Linux with:
apt-get update
apt-get install ruby-dev
The Dpl provides support for vast number of services, including: Heroku, Cloud Foundry, AWS/S3, and more. To use it, define provider and any additional parameters required by the provider.
For example if you want to use it to deploy your application to Heroku, you need to specify heroku
as provider, specify api_key
and app
.
All possible parameters can be found in the Heroku API section.
staging:
stage: deploy
script:
- gem install dpl
- dpl heroku api --app=my-app-staging --api_key=$HEROKU_STAGING_API_KEY
environment: staging
In the above example we use Dpl to deploy my-app-staging
to Heroku server with API key stored in HEROKU_STAGING_API_KEY
secure variable.
To use different provider take a look at long list of Supported Providers.
Using Dpl with Docker
In most cases, you configured GitLab Runner to use your server’s shell commands.
This means that all commands are run in the context of local user (for example gitlab_runner
or gitlab_ci_multi_runner
).
It also means that most probably in your Docker container you don’t have the Ruby runtime installed.
You must install it:
staging:
stage: deploy
script:
- apt-get update -yq
- apt-get install -y ruby-dev
- gem install dpl
- dpl heroku api --app=my-app-staging --api_key=$HEROKU_STAGING_API_KEY
rules:
- if: $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == "main"
environment: staging
The first line apt-get update -yq
updates the list of available packages,
where second apt-get install -y ruby-dev
installs the Ruby runtime on system.
The above example is valid for all Debian-compatible systems.
Usage in staging and production
It’s pretty common in the development workflow to have staging (development) and production environments
Let’s consider the following example: we would like to deploy the main
branch to staging
and all tags to the production
environment.
The final .gitlab-ci.yml
for that setup would look like this:
staging:
stage: deploy
script:
- gem install dpl
- dpl heroku api --app=my-app-staging --api_key=$HEROKU_STAGING_API_KEY
rules:
- if: $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == "main"
environment: staging
production:
stage: deploy
script:
- gem install dpl
- dpl heroku api --app=my-app-production --api_key=$HEROKU_PRODUCTION_API_KEY
rules:
- if: $CI_COMMIT_TAG
environment: production
We created two deploy jobs that are executed on different events:
-
staging
: Executed for all commits pushed to themain
branch -
production
: Executed for all pushed tags
We also use two secure variables:
-
HEROKU_STAGING_API_KEY
: Heroku API key used to deploy staging app -
HEROKU_PRODUCTION_API_KEY
: Heroku API key used to deploy production app
Storing API keys
To store API keys as secure variables:
- On the left sidebar, select Search or go to and find your project.
- Select Settings > CI/CD.
- Expand Variables.
The variables defined in the project settings are sent along with the build script to the runner.
The secure variables are stored out of the repository. Never store secrets in
your project’s .gitlab-ci.yml
file. It is also important that the secret’s value
is hidden in the job log.
You access added variable by prefixing it’s name with $
(on non-Windows runners)
or %
(for Windows Batch runners):
-
$VARIABLE
: Use for non-Windows runners -
%VARIABLE%
: Use for Windows Batch runners
Read more about CI/CD variables.