GitLab-CI-CD VS gitlab-ci-local

As with the earlier post on PHP linting within GitLab CI/CD, in a real scenario this would be split into two projects. In my real usage, I have one project with the general CI/CD functionality, then the specific website project can extend from those functions to push out to the server. In this demo scenario, it is all in one project of my GitHub.

I split this into two pieces, taking advantage of GitLab’s ability to extend other functions, even functions in other projects. My real work scenario is using GitLab, hence using GitLab CI. For the purposes of sharing here, I’ve put them in my personal GitHub. I know that’s an unintuitive combination.

Among these options, the one that has gained the most traction is gitlab-ci-local :

The main reason behind this change is to have consistent scripts for local testing and remote runners during testing and debugging. However, there are already tools available, such as gitlab-ci-local, that allow you to run jobs locally, partially invalidating this argument. Additionally, working locally may not provide access to all necessary variables.

Two tools I've used for local Gitlab CI runs: - https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local - https://gitlab.com/AdrianDC/gitlabci-local

What you might want to look at is this, to meet both needs https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local

https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local exists but its not quite there yet. Personally Ive resorted to setting up a self-managed instance at home, relying on the included linter/validator and pushing repeatedly as before.

If you already have/had a working pipeline then maybe https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local has something worth looking at.

> One thing that would be nice, however, would be the ability to run the entire pipeline locally.

This cost me many hours of waiting for the Gitlab CI runner when debugging non-trivial pipelines, when the issue was something that did not have to do with the script steps inside of the jobs but rather how the Gitlab runner handled things.

I've found gitlab-ci-local [1] which actually does run the Gitlab pipeline locally, although I had to write some boilerplaye scripts to set up all the necessary 'CI_FOO_SOMETHING' environment variables before running the tool. (Which sometimes came back to bite me because the issue was actually in the content of some of those environment variables). It's still a very good tool.

[1] https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local

Most CI/CD tools let you run pipelines locally. Just one example: https://circleci.com/blog/using-runner-for-local-testing/ . In my opinion Gitlab and Circleci have the test tools for this.