Use Build pipelines

Originally published on LinkedIn on 2020-05-27.

These days I was on vacation, and I’m preparing for my new job which I will start soon. A friend of mine asked for a bit of help with their mapserver RPM packages, because they needed a special combination of mapserver7.4.4 , php7.4, postgresql12 on CentOS7 and CentOS8.

Packer, Terraform, KVM Ansible solution: Link to heading

As I worked with some hashicorp products in the past I tried to create something local on my workstation on top of KVM together with packer, terraform-cli, terraform-libvirt and ansible. Nice to play around and get in touch with mapserver and compiling it. But this is way to complicated.

Podman Container solution: Link to heading

Yes I’m getting old, but I like to try out new stuff. So I was interessted about using podman on my fedora workstation. Wow, very easy to use, just create the Dockerfile and it worked!

Much easier, but to prepare the build environment I couldn’t use a CentOS7/8 base container. There is plenty of stuff to install inside the container as build requrements. I wouldn’t like to rebuild the image every time I trigger a build of mapserver. To solve this I created the build containers with podman on my local fedora workstation.

Then I used this Container image for the mapserver build. So just de build itselve is trigered when the container starts.

Nice but not perfect.

Build Pipelines: Link to heading

gitlab Link to heading

So let’s do some GitOPS. Let’s implement this in a gitlab CI/CD pipeline. Jason Tevnan, friend of mine, worked a lot with pipielines, so I asked him for some hints. I knew that there are build pipeline features available at gitlab. And there is also a built in container registry. I uploaded the prepared containers to the container registry of the gitlab project. Then it’s not that much effort anymore to create the CI pipeline. Just a spec file and some gitlab-ci.yml magic and I could download the artifacts.

stages:
  - source
  - build
  - test
  - deploy

.build_template: &rpm_build_definition
    stage: build
    script: 
        - mkdir -p rpmbuild/{BUILD,RPMS,SOURCES,SPECS,SRPMS}
        - spectool -g -C rpmbuild/SOURCES "`pwd`/redhat/mapserver-7.4.4.spec"
        - rpmbuild -D "_topdir `pwd`/rpmbuild" --clean --target x86_64 -ba "`pwd`/redhat/mapserver-7.4.4.spec"
    artifacts:
        expire_in: 1 day
        paths:
            - rpmbuild/SRPMS/mapserver-*.rpm 
            - rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/mapserver-*.x86_64.rpm
            - rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/php-*.x86_64.rpm

centos7-build:
    <<: *rpm_build_definition
    tags:
        - linux
    image: "registry.gitlab.com/treenerd/mapserver:centos7"

centos8-build:
    <<: *rpm_build_definition
    tags:
        - linux
    image: "registry.gitlab.com/treenerd/mapserver:centos8"

It’s not finished yet and plenty of stuff to improve, but it’s a starting point.

bitbucket Link to heading

I got asked, if I can do this also with bitbucket. I didn’t work with bitbucket that much but the documentation told me that it should be possible. The only thing what I missed, was the build in container registry like in gitlab. But hey let’s use the container registry of my gitlab project… After some bitbucket-pipeline.yml magic the rpm packages where build also there.

image: registry.gitlab.com/treenerd/mapserver:centos7

pipelines:
  default:
    - step:
        script:
          - echo "Everything is awesome!"
          - pwd
          - ls -lah
          - whoami
          - mkdir -p rpmbuild/{BUILD,RPMS,SOURCES,SPECS,SRPMS}
          - spectool -g -C "`pwd`/rpmbuild/SOURCES" "`pwd`/redhat/php-mapserver-7.4.4.spec"
          - rpmbuild -D "_topdir `pwd`/rpmbuild" --clean --target x86_64 -ba "`pwd`/redhat/php-mapserver-7.4.4.spec"
        artifacts:
          - rpmbuild/SRPMS/mapserver-*.rpm
          - rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/mapserver-*.x86_64.rpm
          - rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/php-*.x86_64.rpm

Summary Link to heading

Always be open for new solutions. There is a reason why they exist. Try them, use them and ask people, friends what they think about what you create.

Thank you for your help and also for your questions!