CI for your home dir | Brain Phrye

Once you start putting your home dir in version control, some more options start coming up. And with something like a personal gitlab instance those options multiply even more. Here I’m going to explore using gitlab’s CI features.

I already discussed using gitlab’s ticketing feature to keep track of tasks. And previously I wrote about an update script for my home dir to keep the various tools I use current. However gitlab also offers a CI system which allows me to automate those updates.

The first step is to move that update script into a hook. Vcsh supports hooks and you can have one run after a pull happens. I have mine set a stamp file so that it only does the update once a day. This means that one vcsh pull will take a bit longer, but that’s fine. And because of the next step it will generally only take a long time on one machine. In fact, if I get around to scheduling the CI pipeline once a night, it shouldn’t even take time then.

The next part of this is the configuration file for Gitlab’s CI. Normally it’s at the base of the repo in .gitlab-ci.yml. However that won’t work well here because that would go in the base of my home dir. I’m using my history repo to trigger ci builds so I put my CI configs in ~/.config/vcsh/gitlab/past-ci.yml. It’s then a simple matter of going to my history project in gitlab and setting a custom path for the CI YAML file and adding an ssh private key to the CI variables. The config is really simple - the YAML file:

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---
image: registry.local/sys/slack/system

stages:
  - ci

test:
  stage: ci
  script:
    - env | sort
    - ./.config/vcsh/gitlab/past-ci.sh

And then the script:

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#!/bin/bash

chmod 600 "$SSH_KEY"
eval "$(ssh-agent)"
ssh-add "$SSH_KEY"
for h in server-{a,b,c,1,2,3}.local \
         desktop.remote.com; do
  # shellcheck disable=SC2088
  ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -A -i "$SSH_KEY" kevin@$h \
    '~/bin/vcsh pull < /dev/null'
done

In the future I’m probably going to explore something like renovate-bot for my home dir to keep scripts and third party scripts up to date. I use reminders that I wrote myself elsewhere, but this might be better if it can send me merge requests.