How to publish builds to Artifactory from GitLab CI?

Question

I am looking for an easy and clean way to publish artefacts build with GitLab CI onto Artifactory.

I was able to spot https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus/blob/af8af9552966348a15dc1bf488efb29a8ca27111/lib/omnibus/publishers/artifactory_publisher.rb but I wasnt able to find any documentation regarding how I am supposed to configure it to make it work.

Note: I am looking for a gitlab_ci.yaml approach, not as in implementing it externally.

Answer 1

At a basic level, this can be done with the JFrog CLI tools. Unless you want to embed configuration in your .gitlab-ci.yml (I don't) you will first need to run (on your runner):

jfrog rt c

This will prompt for your Artifactory URL and an API key by default. After entering these items, you'll find ~/.jfrog/jfrog-cli.conf containing JSON like so:

    {
      "artifactory": {
        "url": "http://artifactory.localdomain:8081/artifactory/",
        "apiKey": "AKCp2V77EgrbwK8NB8z3LdvCkeBPq2axeF3MeVK1GFYhbeN5cfaWf8xJXLKkuqTCs5obpzxzu"
      }
    }

You can copy this file to the GitLab runner's home directory - in my case, /home/gitlab-runner/.jfrog/jfrog-cli.conf

Once that is done, the runner will authenticate with Artifactory using that configuration. There are a bunch of other possibilities for authentication if you don't want to use API keys - check the JFrog CLI docs.

Before moving on, make sure the 'jfrog' executable is in a known location, with execute permissions for the gitlab-runner user. From here you can call the utility within your .gitlab-ci.yml - here is a minimal example for a node.js app that will pass the Git tag as the artifact version:

stages:
  - build-package
build-package:
  stage: build-package
  script:
    - npm install
    - tar -czf test-project.tar.gz *
    - /usr/local/bin/jfrog rt u --build-name="Test Project" --build-number="${CI_BUILD_TAG}" test-project.tar.gz test-repo