Where to store settings.xml for maven in docker based GitLab CI setup

Question

I have several maven projects (not multi-modules), that are residing in GitLab. I like to setup the GitLab CI for these projects, so I looked at gitlab-ci.yml files on how to do this.

I found https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/examples/artifactory_and_gitlab, which describes to put the settings.xml in the project itself and then referr it in the gitlab-ci file.

But I was wondering, how this is done when having multiple projects that would need this settings.xml, as putting it multiple times in the repository seems bad.

Locally I have it in my .m2 directory, but how and where to put it on the gitlab server for the pipeline ?

Answer 1

I mount the host volume via the config.toml as the following example: -

concurrent = 1
check_interval = 30

[[runners]]
  name = "some-name"
  url = "url/to/gitlab/"
  token = "some-token"
  executor = "docker"
  [runners.docker]
    tls_verify = false
    image = "some-maven-image"
    privileged = false
    disable_cache = false
    volumes = ["...", "path/to/host/dir:/some/name:rw"]
    pull_policy = "if-not-present"
    shm_size = 0
  [runners.cache]

While the path/to/host/dir is a path on host machine which contains many files including with settings.xml, settings-security.xml and so on, based on project requirement. On the other hand the /some/name is a directory inside the docker.

At the .gitlab-ci.yml, I provide the before_script as the following example: -

before_script:
  - cp -f /some/name/settings.xml  $HOME/.m2/settings.xml
  - cp -f /some/name/settings-security.xml $HOME/.m2/settings-security.xml
  - ...
after_script:
  - rm -f $HOME/.m2/settings.xml
  - rm -f $HOME/.m2/settings-security.xml
  - ...

Please visit Advanced configuration for further information about the config.toml.