I've been overhauling the way that I build Debian packages and websites for myself. In the past I used to use pbuilder but it is pretty heavyweight and in my previous role I was much happier using Gitlab runners for building and deploying applications.

Gitlab is something I've no interest in self-hosting, and Jenkins is an abomination, so I figured I'd write down what kind of things I did and explore options again. My use-cases are generally very simple:

• I trigger some before-steps
  • Which mostly mean pulling a remote git repository to the local system.
• I then start a build.
  • This means running debuild, hugo, or similar.
  • This happens in an isolated Docker container.
• Once the build is complete I upload the results somehere.
  • Either to a Debian package-pool, or to a remote host via rsync.

Running all these steps inside a container is well-understood, but I cheat. It is significantly easier to run the before/after steps on your host - because that way you don't need to setup SSH keys in your containers, and that is required when you clone (private) remote repositories, or wish to upload to hosts via rsync over SSH.

Anyway I wrote more thoughts here:

• https://github.com/skx/thyme/

Then I made it work. So that was nice.

To complete the process I also implemented a simple HTTP-server which will list all available jobs, and allow you to launch one via a click. The output of the build is streamed to your client in real-time. I didn't bother persisting output and success/failure to a database, but that would be trivial enough.

It'll tide me over until I try ick again, anyway. :)

Tags: ci, ick | No comments