Kimserey's blog

Gitlab CI/CD with pipeline, artifacts and environments Almost a year ago I wrote about how we could setup CI/CD with gitlab pipeline . I showed a very simple 3 stages pipeline build/test/deploy. Since then Gitlab has improved considerably their CI tool with features simplifying releases management. Today we will revisit pipelines and introduce few concepts which will help in managing releases. Pipeline Releases Artifacts Environments 1. Pipeline Pipeline are defines as jobs. Each job can be part of a stage in the pipeline and multiple jobs can run concurrently if part of the same stage. The pipeline is define in a .gitlab-ci.yml file placed at the root of the application. We can setup our own runner or use a shared runner from Gitlab. The shared runner runs on Docker therefore it’s possible to build the dotnet image and build our dotnet application. Here is the pipeline we will be using as example pipeline: image : microsoft/dotnet:latest stages: - build - test - pa...

Versioning for open source library Few weeks ago I explained how Gitversion can be used to apply semantic versioning to projects based on commit and tag history. Today I will dive deeper in the purpose of versioning and introduce a flow which can be followed to version open source project libraries by looking into four important parts in the lifecycle of an open source library. Version with Semantic versioning Branching strategy and Commits Continuous Integration and Releases 1. Version with Semantic versioning Semantic versioning is ideal for versioning libraries. It is formed by three numbers {major}.{minor}.{patch} . Each number is used to indicate to the user the level of safety for upgrading the library. Upgrade of the major is risky and has chances to contain breaking changes, therefore looking at release notes or looking for migration would be recommended. Upgrade of the minor has lesser risk and can be used to show availability of new features. Upgrade of the pat...

Setup a CI/CD pipeline with Gitlab for ASPNET Core on Ubuntu Few weeks ago I explained how we could setup a CI/CD pipeline whereby the runner would be on Windows and the last stage was to package the application. Today we will see how we can setup a runner on Ubuntu CI server and use it to build and deploy an ASP MET Core application onto a Ubuntu 16.04 server. This post will be composed by three parts: Setup the runner on the CI server Setup the application on the server Setup the job in our project If you are unfamiliar with Gitlab pipeline and its terminology, you can read my previous post where I explain the main concepts behind GitLab pipeline with runner, jobs and stages . If you are unfamiliar with ssh and systemd, you can read my previous blog post on useful ssh commands and my previous blog post on how to manage Kestrel process with systemd . 1. Setup the runner on the CI server Setup the runner on your CI server by getting the package with apt-get. curl -L https...

How to setup Continuous Integration/Deployment with GitLab for ASP NET Core application In any application, Continuous Integration and Continous Deployment environments are important to setup to remove respectively the risking of breaking your application while pushing code to master branch and having to manually deploy your application each time you need to either test it or deliver it. GitLab comes with a set of features to integrate quickly CI/CD to your application for free! Today we will see how we can setup CI/CD by leveraging the free services from GitLab. This post will be composed by 4 parts: 1. Overview of the scenario 2. Setup a runner 3. Configure your job 4. Monitor your deployment on GitLab 1. Overview of the scenario The example that I will take is an ASP NET Core application which runs as a Windows service. My scenario is the most simplistic one may have: I want to setup CI, meaning build and running test and detect break in my code at each push to master branc...