Over the past couple of years I’ve been working on and off on a personal project to migrate and update a GitLab CI pipeline on my self-hosted GitLab for building and deploying this site. Unfortunately my self-hosted GitLab used to be on a e-waste HP DL380 G7 rack server that I no longer have after moving house, so I’ve gone back to using my old 2008 MacPro 3,1 as a Proxmox server, where I now run GitLab (which oddly is what I first used this Mac for several years ago).
As part of the update, I wanted to achieve a couple of goals:
- update the GitLab pipeline to deploy to a staging server for testing, and then deploy to the live server
- template any deployment files that are server/domain specific
- update my Docker images for WordPress, updating the plugins, and anything that needs to be in the image to support the runtime, e.g. nginx, php plugins for nginx etc.
- move to a new cloud provider that would allow me to provision VMs with Terraform
- automate updating SSL certs with Let’s Encrypt certbot
I won’t share my completed pipeline because I don’t want to share specifics about how my WordPress site is configured, but I’ll give an overview of what I used to automate various parts of it:
- Terraform to provision my VMs on Hetzner – 2CPU/4GB VMs are pretty good value
- Ansible to template nginx and WordPress domain specific configs
- GitLab CI pipeline to automate all the steps
While I’ve ended up with a working solution that meets my goals (I can run the pipeline to deploy to my test server or deploy latest to my new live server), I still have a few areas I could improve:
- GitLab CI Environments, and parameterization – I don’t feel I’ve taken enough advantage of these yet. The jobs that deploy to my test server run automatically, but the deploy to my live set is the same set of jobs that I manually run, and configured to deploy to a different server – I feel there’s more I can parameterize here and need to do some more experimentation in this area
Although this effort was spread over a couple of years before I got to a point of completion, it was a great opportunity to gain some more experience across all these tools.