Gitlab Runner - New folder for each build

Question

I'm using Gitlab CI for my project. When I push on develop branch, it runs tests and update the code on my test environment (a remote server).

But the gitlab runner is already using the same build folder : builds/a3ac64e9/0/myproject/myproject

But I would like to create a now folder every time :

• builds/a3ac64e9/1/yproject/myproject
• builds/a3ac64e9/2/yproject/myproject
• builds/a3ac64e9/3/yproject/myproject
• and so on

Using this, I could just update my website by changing a symbolic link pointing to the last runner directory.

Is there a way to configure Gitlab Runner this way ?

Answer 1

While it doesn't make sense to use your build directory as your deployment directory, you can setup a custom build directory

Open config.toml in a text editor: (more info on where to find it here)

Set enabled = true under [runners.custom_build_dir] (more info here)

[runners.custom_build_dir]
  enabled = true

In your .gitlab-ci.yml file, under variables set GIT_CLONE_PATH. It must start with $CI_BUILDS_DIR/, e.g. $CI_BUILDS_DIR/$CI_JOB_ID/$CI_PROJECT_NAME, which will probably give you what you're looking for, although if you have multiple stages, they will have different job IDs. Alternatively, you could try $CI_BUILDS_DIR/$CI_COMMIT_SHA, which would give you a unique folder for each commit. (More info here)

variables:
    GIT_CLONE_PATH: '$CI_BUILDS_DIR/$CI_JOB_ID/$CI_PROJECT_NAME'

Unfortunately there is currently an issue with using GIT_BUILDS_DIR in GIT_CLONE_PATH, if you're using Windows and Powershell, so you may have to do something like this as a work-around, if all your runners have the same build directory: GIT_CLONE_PATH: 'C:\GitLab-Runner/builds/$CI_JOB_ID/$CI_PROJECT_NAME'

You may want to take a look at the variables available to you (predefined variables) to find the most suitable variables for your path.

Answer 2

You might want to read the following answer Changing the build intermediate paths for gitlab-runner

I'll repost my answer here:

Conceptually, this approach is not the way to go; the build directory is not a deployment directory, it's a temporary directory, to build or to deploy from, whereas on a shell executor this could be fixed.

So what you need is to deploy from that directory with a script as per gitlab-ci.yml below, to the correct directory of deployment.

stages:
- deploy

variables:
  TARGET_DIR: /home/ab12/public_html/$CI_PROJECT_NAME

deploy:
  stage: deploy
  script:
     mkdir -pv $TARGET_DIR
     rsync -r --delete ./ $TARGET_DIR
  tags:
    - myrunner

This will move your projectfiles in /home/ab12/public_html/

naming your projects as project1 .. projectn, all your projects could use this same .gitlab-ci.yml file.