Exporting a GitLab CI Pipeline

In this tutorial, you will pull an example package that declares Kubernetes resources and two kpt functions. Then you will export a pipeline that runs the functions against the resources on GitLab CI. This tutorial takes about 5 minutes.

Before you begin

New to GitLab CI? Here is Getting Started with GitLab CI

Before diving into the following tutorial, you need to create a public repo on GitLab if you don’t have one yet, e.g. function-export-example.

On your local machine, create an empty directory:

mkdir function-export-example
cd function-export-example

Use kpt pkg get to fetch source files of this tutorial:

# Init git
git init
git remote add origin https://github.com/<USER>/<REPO>.git
# Fetch source files
kpt pkg get https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/kpt/package-examples/function-export example-package

Then you will get an example-package directory:

• resources/resources.yaml: declares a Deployment and a Namespace.
• resources/constraints/: declares constraints used by the gatekeeper-validate function.
• functions.yaml: runs two functions declaratively:
  • gatekeeper-validate enforces constraints over all resources.
  • label-namespace adds a label to all Namespaces.

Exporting a pipeline

kpt fn export example-package --workflow gitlab-ci --output .gitlab-ci.yml

Running this command will get a .gitlab-ci.yml like this:

stages:
  - run-kpt-functions
kpt:
    stage: run-kpt-functions
    image: docker
    services:
      - docker:dind
    script: docker run -v $PWD:/app -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock gcr.io/kpt-dev/kpt:latest
        fn run /app/example-package

Integrating with your existing pipeline

Now you can manually copy and paste the kpt field in the .gitlab-ci.yml file into your existing GitLab CI config file, and merge the stages field.

If you don’t have one yet, you can simply copy and paste the file to the root of your repo. It is fully functional.

If you want to see the diff after running kpt functions, append an after_script field to run kpt pkg diff. Your final .gitlab-ci.yaml file looks like this:

stages:
  - run-kpt-functions
kpt:
    stage: run-kpt-functions
    image: docker
    services:
      - docker:dind
    script: docker run -v $PWD:/app -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock gcr.io/kpt-dev/kpt:latest
        fn run /app/example-package
    after_script:
      - docker run -v $PWD:/app gcr.io/kpt-dev/kpt:latest
        pkg diff /app/example-package
        --diff-tool git --diff-tool-opts "--no-pager diff"

Viewing the result on GitLab

git add .
git commit -am 'Init pipeline'
git push --set-upstream origin master

Once the changes are committed and pushed to GitLab, you can see the latest job on GitLab CI like this:

Next step

Try to remove the owner: alice line in example-package/resources/resources.yaml.

Once local changes are pushed, you can see how the pipeline fails on GitLab CI.