Welcome!

Authoring complex GitLab CI builds is often made more complicated by the need to express them in Yaml. Instead, this project aims to create GitLab CI pipelines from Kotlin.

By using an actual programming language, we gain:

• Better autocompletion and IDE support,
• Code highlighting in embedded scripts using IntelliJ,
• Support for abstractions like conditions, loops, functions and higher-order functions,
• Built-in plugins to make configuration easier,
• Versioning: we (the maintainers) can deprecate and remove behavior without breaking your builds.

Why?

GitLab CI configuration is written in Yaml, in a .gitlab-ci.yml file. As projects grow, Yaml becomes unwieldy and reuse between jobs becomes harder. Since the introduction of CI, GitLab has provided many tools to reduce duplication: global configuration, include, anchors, extends and !reference. All of these still fall short of a real programming or scripting language, each adding yet another syntax that must be learned by users.

Kotlin is a modern statically-typed programming language created by JetBrains. Among its various uses, it's well suited for the creation of domain-specific languages (DSLs). Thanks for Kotlin's DSL powers, we can easily create complex pipelines:

gitlabCi {
    val test by stage() //(1)!

    val helloWorld by job(stage = test) { //(2)!
        script {
            shell("echo 'Hello world'")
        }
    }

    val k8sImage = "${Variable.Registry.image}/build/k8s" //(4)!

    val buildK8s = job("k8s:docker:build", stage = test) {
        useDockerInDocker() //(3)!
        useContainerRegistry()

        script {
            docker.build(k8sImage, dockerfile = "k8s.dockerfile")
            docker.push(k8sImage)
        }
    }

    if (Value.isDefaultBranch) { //(5)!
        job("deploy", stage = test) {
            dependsOn(buildK8s)

            image(k8sImage)

            beforeScript {
                shell("kubectl config use-context opensavvy/config:opensavvy-agent")
                helm.addRepository("itzg", "https://itzg.github.io/minecraft-server-charts")
                helm.updateRepositories()
            }

            script {
                helm.deploy(
                    release = "minecraft",
                    chart = "itzg/minecraft",
                    values = listOf("minecraft.yml"),
                    namespace = "minecraft"
                )
            }
        }
    }
}.println()

1. Declare a CI stage. Learn more.
2. Declare a new job in that stage. Learn more.
3. Use plugins to easily configure Docker, Gradle, Helm and more. Learn more.
4. Easily and type-safely use the CI environment to conditionally create the pipeline. Learn more.
5. Use regular if, for, while constructs or any other Kotlin functions—no need to learn about extends, !reference or anchors.

Where do I start?

• Setting up a project
• Start authoring pipelines
• Learn more about plugins

Don't hesitate to star and share the project ❤️