GitLab CI is up and running

As announced less than two weeks ago, the next steps in our GitLab migration are following. While we originally planned that the migration from Bugzilla to GitLab issues would be the next step we received generous support from the brand new fosshost project: They provided us with the virtual infrastructure to be able to set up our first GitLab Runner.
A huge thank you to the fosshost for welcoming us aboard (and in record time)!

Standing on the shoulders of the xfce-test project by Florian and with support from Jason we managed to get a Docker container xfce-build up and running that we now use for a (for now: very basic) test, aka “does it build?”. A nice side-effect of having this container published on Dockerhub is that everyone can easily use it locally by running docker pull xfce/xfce-build.

If you’re curious what’s inside the container you can take a look at the Dockerfile. In short we use the latest Ubuntu 20.04 as a basis and then compile the Xfce core libraries based on the latest Git tag on the master branch.

The first project I set a pipeline up for is xfce4-settings. So from now on every commit and merge request will be built automatically and we as developers will receive immediate feedback. If you want to see what this looks like feel free to click here.

Next steps

Enabling the pipeline in more core repos will certainly be the next step. This should be as easy as adding this .gitlab-ci.yml file to the repository’s master branch and enabling the CI/CD feature of the project.

In parallel we have continued to work on the Bugzilla migration, but more on that later. Stay tuned!