Gitlab support -- running validation step in gitlab

[garethjudson]

Wasn't sure where to post but this is what I did to make the validation work in gitlab.
I created a custom container which I installed flipt into, basically, I had some issues with the default container. I'm not sure what was going wrong tbh, but it might be me doing something wrong, or some combination of gitlab and docker magic that I did wrong. But you probably don't need to do that.

The project structure has the feature toggle yml stored in a directory 'toggles' at the root. I put a file per namespace
I created a validation script, which looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -eu

flipt validate $(find toggles -type 'f' -name '*.features.yml')

And the .gitlab.yml step looks like:

build:
  image: <custom-flipt-docker-image-here>
  stage: build
  script:
    - scripts/validate.sh
  artifacts:
    when: always
    paths:
      - toggles/

I had to use find for the validate command, as glob expansion did not work as I expected, and flipt itself doesn't do the expansion.

I figured out that the '**/.yml' was not matching multi-level subdirectories in sh or in bash. I verified by echoing the **/.yml
However I use zsh as my default shell and in that, it does match multi-levels rather than one. So I got different behaviour locally vs in the container.

This is was not the behaviour I expected-- so after playing around I found that using find was much easier.
Hope this is useful for others.

[GeorgeMac]

Hey @garethjudson thanks for raising the issue.

Could you try passing 0 arguments to flipt validate. It should use the same strategy as flipt does when it selects state files from its source. When we first implemented it, we had arguments and eventually we taught it to perform the same strategy as it performs in the server. You might need an up to date version of Flipt to make that work. It should match files like you have defined.

[garethjudson]

Initially I had tried that, I ran into some issues, but additionally (my opinion) telling Flipt cli what I want validated directly, makes more sense, it's just simple and understandable. Thats generally just how cli tools work so I think other devs coming along later will make sense of it without having to fully understand how to configure Flipt.

Additionally it's difficult to attach the folders in my project to a specific location in the gitlab build container (i.e. the flipt image I specified). By specifying the image, my build will run in the image, but the mount points of directories is not the root-- at least when I output the present working dir, it's not the same as if I just run the container locally and attach to it. I think if I had to setup my build job to operate with Flipt config, I'd probably be better of running docker in docker and manually call a Flipt docker image within the build job so I can control exactly where the files are mounted.

Realistically I just want an easy "are these files valid". The current approach is just a more simple version of how the flipt github action is setup to operate-- in that case there is just an additional typescript wrapper which does the globbing of files and then passes them to flipt.

So for pipelines passing the arguments in, is just easier in my opinion at least.

[garethjudson]

Also thank you for the reply 👍