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GitLab bot account: Another GitLab account to post comments from the GitLab CI pipeline to the merge requests on our behalf. This can be also set up using the same sign-up page.
We'll later use Pandoc's containers to convert our index.md Markdown file to the index.html HTML file in the GitLab CI pipeline. We can also test it locally with Docker as follows:
In the above YAML snippet, we'll add a pipeline step to the publish stage and execute a container image I created for publishing sites to Netlify. The step will execute one command, gitlab-deploy-site, that's pre-built to the container image. Pretty much all of the magic for publishing to Netlify happen within the container image. We'll take a look at it in a later section.
The site deploy functionality is implemented using a small Go program. It performs the deployment using the official Netlify Open API client library from files on a directory. The directory, the site ID, the authentication token, and the rest of the details are configured using environment variables that are picked up using Kelsey Hightower's envconfig library. The program creates a preview site when the environment variable NETLIFY_DRAFT is set.
The site deploy functionality is implemented using a small Go program. It performs the deployment using the official Netlify Open API client library from files on a directory. The directory, the site ID, the authentication token, and the rest of the details are configured using environment variables that are picked up using Kelsey Hightower's envconfig library. The program creates a preview site when the environment variable NETLIFY_DRAFT is set.
The site deployment could have also been done using Netlify's command-line interface, but I felt it didn't fit the purpose. The first issue is that it was pretty difficult to capture the draft link from the tool output so that I could send it forward. Second, the tool depends on a high amount of libraries and tools which made it hard to keep the container image small in size. For the CLI, it makes sense to have all the dependencies it has because it does more than just deployments, but in my case, they were just in the way.
If you're interested in seeing a real-world example of the setup in action, check out my website's GitLab project. Thanks for reading!
We'll later use Pandoc's containers to convert our index.md Markdown file to the index.html HTML file in the GitLab CI pipeline. We can also test it locally with Docker as follows:
As a developer of various websites, I find Netlify to be a fantastic platform for hosting static websites these days. It's straightforward to use and it provides a lot of nice integrations to development tools. For example, Netlify can attached to Git hosting platforms such as GitHub and GitLab, where a lot of web development is coordinated these days.
In the GitLab CI pipeline, the Go program is wrapped with a Bash script that figures out all the configuration details from the CI environment variables and passes them to the program. Additionally, it takes care of posting the draft link as a comment to the merge request using curl.