Deploying a simple portfolio with Argo Tunnels and containers for fun 🚀 - Part 2

Alright so now that I finally got done with part one of this blog post, here is part 2!

By now you should have Cloudflare Argo tunnel and Gitlab runner running.

$ podman ps
CONTAINER ID  IMAGE                                  COMMAND               CREATED     STATUS                PORTS       NAMES
31f46243cbe9  docker.io/gitlab/gitlab-runner:alpine  run --user=gitlab...  8 days ago  Up About an hour ago              gitlab-runner

$ systemctl --user status cloudflared
Loaded: loaded (/home/leon/.config/systemd/user/cloudflared.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Sun 2021-10-10 14:51:26 IST; 1h 8min ago

For Gitlab CI/CD to work you need to add a .gitlab-ci.yml, in the root folder of your project This is like the main ingredient.

This is what my .gitlab-ci.yml looks like.

stages:
  - publish
  - deploy
variables:
  TAG_LATEST: $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE/$CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME:latest
  TAG_COMMIT: $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE/$CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME:$CI_COMMIT_SHORT_SHA
# Begin building the image
publish:
  image: quay.io/podman/stable:latest
  stage: publish
  tags:
    - publish
  script:
    - podman build -t $TAG_COMMIT -t $TAG_LATEST .
    - podman login -u gitlab-ci-token -p $CI_BUILD_TOKEN $CI_REGISTRY
    - podman  push $TAG_COMMIT
    - podman push $TAG_LATEST

# Deployment
deploy:
  image: alpine:latest
  stage: deploy
  tags:
    - deployment
  before_script:
    - apk update && apk add openssh-client
    - mkdir -p ~/.ssh
    - chmod 700 ~/.ssh
    - eval $(ssh-agent -s)
    - echo "${PK_KEY}" |tr -d '\r' | ssh-add -
    - ssh-keyscan $SERVER_IP

  script:
    - ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no $SERVER_USER@$SERVER_IP "podman login -u gitlab-ci-token -p $CI_BUILD_TOKEN $CI_REGISTRY"
    - ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no $SERVER_USER@$SERVER_IP "podman pull $TAG_COMMIT"
    - ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no $SERVER_USER@$SERVER_IP "podman container rm -f $WEB_NAME || true"
    - ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no $SERVER_USER@$SERVER_IP "podman run -d -p 8080:80 --name $WEB_NAME $TAG_COMMIT"
  environment:
    name: production
    url: https://portfolio.afro-coder.com/
  # Run only on the main branch
  only:
    - main

Now let us dive into some of the important variables here, these need to be defined in your Gitlab Repository(Individual repository) => Settings => CI/CD => Variables.

Make sure you mask the important and sensitive variables, and protect them so that they do not show up in your logs,
your username also needs to be longer than 4 chars to mask it and also meet their RegEx criteria

$SERVER_USER - SSH login for the user.
$SERVER_IP - The VM where you would run these containers
$WEB_NAME - Container name you would like to keep
$PK_KEY - Private key used to SSH to the server. You can use ssh-keygen to create a key and add the public key to your .ssh/authorized_keys file

Further documentation on the Gitlab Variables can be found here

Now go ahead and commit this file to your repository.

git add .gitlab-ci.yml
git commit -s -m "Added Gitlab CI"
git push -u

If your gitlab CI/CD doesn't run after pushing it to the main branch re-check the branch name
and the tags you've given your runner, they should match the one in the .gitlab-ci.yml file

If your build goes successfully, you should see the following.

After the pipeline builds the container should be running on the host

$ podman ps
CONTAINER ID  IMAGE                                                     COMMAND               CREATED         STATUS             PORTS                 NAMES
31646243cbe9  docker.io/gitlab/gitlab-runner:alpine                     run --user=gitlab...  8 days ago      Up 16 minutes ago                        gitlab-runner-priv
4930b205caa1  registry.gitlab.com/leon9923/new-portfolio/main:c2054av4  httpd-foreground      15 minutes ago  Up 15 minutes ago  0.0.0.0:8080->80/tcp  portfolio.afro-coder.com

And thats it, you now have a self-hosted rootless(But still insecure if not protected correctly.) gitlab CI/CD with podman and Argo Tunnels and it works!

My next goal would be to create a custom executor for gitlab that uses podman without the docker interface altogether, thank you for reading!

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Deploying a simple portfolio with Argo Tunnels and containers for fun 🚀 - Part 2

Leon Nunes

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