CI & CD with GitLab

27 Feb, 2019 — 4 min

Save on the hassle of testing and deploying code & make GitLab do it for you!

In this tutorial we're going to set up a Staging environment as well, and this requires a little prep work. Create a staging branch in your Git repo based on master, if you don't have one. If you already use dev, development, or another name, that's fine, just replace staging with whichever branch name is appropriate for you.

If you're on GitHub or another Git forge, don't worry, you can still do this. Create an account on and create a repo using “CI/CD for External Repositories” (available for free to open source projects only). If you're on GitHub, it'll create a webhook that'll have GitHub trigger GitLab when a push happens so GitLab can make things happen. Otherwise, it checks the repo occasionally based on the URL you give it.

I'm using Heroku for this, so I created another Heroku app to deploy to and gave it the same environment variables, except that I set NODE_ENV to staging.

Additionally, I'm doing this with a Node.js application. Change any npm commands and the Docker image to whatever language you're using. GitLab CI examples with other languages here.

Let's get started with the GitLab CI config. Create a file called .gitlab-ci.yml with the following:

image: node:latest  
  - test  
  - deploy  
  stage: test  
  image: node:10  
    - npm install  
    - npm test  
    - npm build  
  stage: deploy  
  image: ruby:latest  
    - apt update -qy  
    - apt install -y ruby-dev  
    - gem install dpl  
    - dpl --provider=heroku --app=myapp --api-key=$HEROKU\_API\_KEY  
  only: master  
  stage: deploy  
  image: ruby:latest  
    - apt update -qy  
    - apt install -y ruby-dev  
    - gem install dpl  
    - dpl --provider=heroku --app=myapp-staging --api-key=$HEROKU\_API\_KEY  
  only: staging

This does quite a lot. First, it sets a default Docker image to Node.js on the latest version. This doesn't get use though since we override it later.

Next, we define this CI Pipeline as a two-step process: testing and deploying

The test is simple. First, we tell the CI to use Node.js 10.x Docker image and have it install dependencies. Then, we run the npm test and npm build commands. These commands should be specified in your package.json. Here are the full list of commands I personally use for testing, and why:

Then, the master and staging branches each have a deployment stage. The only clause tells the CI that we only allow the respective stage to happen when it's on those branches. Other branches can trigger the Test stage, but won't deploy. The master branch will deploy to a Heroku app called myapp and staging will deploy to myapp-staging. We'll add the API key later, so don't worry about that for now.

For deployment, we're using a Ruby package called dpl. It allows easy deployment to a variety of platforms. The docs can be found here.

Heroku will soon start building applications on deployment, and we can manually opt-in now to take advantage of this feature. Add the following line to your package.json:

"heroku-run-build-script": true,  

Additionally, if you haven't already, many Platform as a Service providers (including Heroku) need a language version if you don't want the oldest supported LTS version. Add the following lines to package.json for Node.js 10.x:

"engines": {  
  "node": "10.x",  
  "npm": "6.7.x"  

Finally, we we need to tell GitLab our Heroku API key so it has permisison to deploy. Your API key can be found in the your Heroku settings page.

In GitLab, go to Settings > CI/CD and expand the Environment variable section. Add a variable called HEROKU_API_KEY and put the API key in the “Input variable value” field. The “Protected” flag allows you to only expose the API key to branches that use Branch Protection, thus making it less likely to be exposed. I recommend this setting. If you use it, you'll need to add the master and staging branches to the list in your repo's Settings > Repository > Protected Branches section. Note that this prevents force-pushing to branches, which may be a problem if you really like rebasing.

That was fairly painless. Now, when you push to any branch it will run CI tests and when you push to master or staging it will automatically deploy to Heroku for you! Combined with a decent build script, this has made my life a LOT easier on the project I'm working on.

This was learned while working on a research project with Professor Owen Gottlieb.

2019-07-31: Content reflow