Gitlab CI how to deploy the latest to a specific directory

Question

I have two projects in Gitlab where one is a submodule (let's call repo "frontend-templates") of the other (let's call this repo "main"). I have set up a Gitlab CI build for the "frontend-templates" repo. The thing is that I don't need testing or building. I only need deploying for this CI in the needed directory. So, I registered a runner for "frontend-templates" project and added .gitlab-ci.yml to the root directory:

job_main:
   type: deploy
   script: echo "Do nothing"

When I push to my repository, the runner fetches the latest commit to the following directory:

/home/gitlab-runner/builds/6231b425/0/Gasimzada/frontend-templates

and just runs echo "Do nothing" .

Now, I want the runner to deploy the "tested" commit to the dev server, which is located in:

/var/www/myapp/submodules/frontend-templates

EDIT: I changed the script to

script: cd /var/www/myapp/submodules/frontend-templates && git pull

but I got an error saying:

cannot open /var/www/myapp/.git/modules/submodules/frontend-templates/FETCH_HEAD: Permission denied

This makes sense because gitlab-runner user does not have access to any directory in /var/www/myapp but it a problem for me because I want to run gulp after deploy, so it compiles necessary scripts after it pulls from the remote repository.

Should I give permission to the root directory of dev environment? Or is there another way to do this?

Answer 1

You can simply perform some form of deployment using the directory you are in. You can rename/delete the directory of the currently deployed code and copy the checkout code there ( rm -rf /var/www/myapp/submodules/frontend-templates && cp -r . /var/www/myapp/submodules/frontend-templates ) or you can use rsync to do the synchronization.

However, these are not atomic operations - they will leave your deployed code in an uncertain state while they are being performed and in a mess if they fail. I'd suggest your /var/www/myapp/submodules/frontend-templates is just a symlink to a directory containing the code:

/var/www/myapp/submodules
  | - 7348110b
  | - a03ed59a
  | - frontend-templates -> ./a03ed59a

You can name the code directories according to the commit hash. The job itself could then look something like this:

job_main:
   type: deploy
   script:
     - cp -r . /var/www/myapp/submodules/$CI_BUILD_REF
     - ln -s ./$CI_BUILD_REF /var/www/myapp/submodules/templink
     - mv -Tf /var/www/myapp/submodules/templink /var/www/myapp/submodules/frontend-templates

NOTE: Obviously, the runner will need necessary file permissions to perform the tasks.