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review-applications.md

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Review applications

GitLab explains it as best in this article:

  • Provide an automatic live preview of changes made in a feature branch by spinning up a dynamic environment for your merge requests.
  • Allow designers and product managers to see your changes without needing to check out your branch and run your changes in a sandbox environment.
  • Allow you to deploy your changes wherever you want.

The boilerplate comes with predefined jobs that allows creating a review application in a feature branch (non-master branches). But for this another tool Traefik needs to be installed on your runner server. Here is a very handy tutorial doing that:

{% hint style="info" %} When talking in the next steps about to replace the server IP then put your IP of your GitLab CI Runner server and replace . with -, for example 192-168-1-250. {% endhint %}

  1. SSH into your GitLab CI Runner
  2. Install apache2-utils for Basic-Auth generation: sudo apt install apache2-utils
  3. Create a password for the Traefik dashboard, replace secure_password with your password: htpasswd -nb admin secure_password
  4. cd /opt/ && sudo nano traefik.toml: Create a Traefik configuration file. Copy the content of Example configuration below and replace your-generated-htpasswd with the output of the previous command
  5. Create an unique network for Traefik which should be accessable by the web: sudo docker network create traefik
  6. Create the Traefik container handling all the routing: sudo docker run -d -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v $PWD/traefik.toml:/traefik.toml -p 80:80 -p 443:443 -l traefik.enable=true -l traefik.frontend.rule=Host:monitor-<your-server-ip>.nip.io -l traefik.port=8080 --network traefik --name traefik traefik:1.7.12-alpine
  7. Navigate to monitor-<your-server-ip>.nip.io, enter the credentials your generated with htpasswd and user admin and you will see the Traefik dashboard
  8. Navigate to GitLab > Project > Settings > CI / CD > Variables and add the variable $CI_TRAEFIK_HOST with value <your-server-ip>.nip.io
  9. Securing review apps itself? Yes, that's possible with Basic Authentication within Traefik and also necessary for this boilerplate
  10. Additionally generate a new review user with htpasswd -nb admin secure_password and store that output as value for the GitLab CI Runner variable $CI_TRAEFIK_BAUTH. Note: $ must be doubled $$ for escaping!
  11. Navigate to GitLab > Project > Settings > CI / CD > Runners and edit your used runner, you must add the traefik tag so jobs are taken correctly only on this runner

{% hint style="success" %} Awesome! If you commit to a non-master branch a dynamic environment is created in GitLab > Project > Operations > Environments. {% endhint %}

{% hint style="warning" %} SSL certificates: Due to some experience in productive usage of the boilerplate it is currently not possible to use nip.io together with Traefik and "Let's Encrypt". So we had adjusted the boilerplate to use HTTP requests instead of HTTPS. {% endhint %}

Example configuration

A complete traefik configuration can look like this:

defaultEntryPoints = ["http"]

[entryPoints]
  [entryPoints.dashboard]
    address = ":8080"
    [entryPoints.dashboard.auth]
      [entryPoints.dashboard.auth.basic]
        # Secure admin dashboard with an "admin" password
        users = ["your-generated-htpasswd"]
  [entryPoints.http]
    address = ":80"
  [entryPoints.https]
    address = ":443"
    [entryPoints.https.redirect]
      entryPoint = "http"

[api]
entrypoint="dashboard"

[docker]
domain = "your-server-ip.nip.io"
watch = true
network = "traefik"
exposedByDefault = false