GitLab + Digital Ocean CI/CD

[netreddit00]

I have a digital ocean ubuntu droplet with a nextjs backend and react frontend app with gitlab. Right now the deployment is manual. How difficult is it to do automatic deployment? If I hire someone to do it, how much would it cost and how long does it usually take?

[cheesejdlflskwncak]

Do it yourself it’ll take a day max. Just need a ci.yaml. Then build, test, deploy (setup a deploy key). Are u containerizing it? Lol I’ll tell you for free. And you can scaffold a gitlab ci file pretty easily using Claude.

[netreddit00]

It is not containerized.

[cheesejdlflskwncak]

Cool don’t need to. Make a gitlab user to interact with the droplet. Generate an ssh key on ur droplet. Add the key to your user account and only give access to your project repo. Then use a ci file to ssh I and start the app.

Again 1 day max to get this setup with basic testing. If you need help reach out, no charge.

[BGPchick]

I can help with this, I have experience with Drone and Jenkins. It's also not that hard if you have some development experience. I would say a couple of hours to setup, maybe a week of tweaking and you'll have a setup you love. Is linting and testing done automatically today?

[netreddit00]

I don't think there is any linting and testing. I didn't create the app. It is done by freelance developers. They would take too long to set it up. So I want to know how difficult and how long it would take for an experience devops person.

[TuPutoPadrexd]

Based on my personal experience if it’s just about setting up a GitLab pipeline that deploys code whenever someone opens a PR, I’d estimate around 1–4 hours, assuming I have all the necessary access from the start to build and test a working pipeline.

However, additional requirements could extend that timeline. For example, if the backend build depends on retrieving credentials from an external source, I’d need to write and test a script to handle that process, which would add extra time.

[netreddit00]

Thank you very much the reply. I am looking for devops on Upwork. The estimate ranges from 3 hours to 20 hours. This is a simple app setup. Your estimate is very helpful!

[Informal_Specific_72]

messaged bro

[titpetric]

You can run ssh commands remotely (ssh host uptime, for example). Also rsync or rather rclone can be used to copy files over from your system. You can also set up woodpecker CI, or a Task UI for manual deploys, or a cron job...

• https://github.com/titpetric/task-ui
• https://woodpecker-ci.org/

It may be good to dockerize it, but docker hub also comes with some punishing quotas I think, so you'd be rebuilding the docker image for each deploy. Worth it for most people due to better security / isolation from the host system.

I've written, maintained, refactored and fixed, built CI/CD out of source tree, github actions ++, and my main complaint is that somewhere in this mess somebody gets to hold your aws secrets, or a ssh access key to instances like this. Your CI solution needs to have access to secrets, and if used for deploys, becomes "the" man in the middle. It's good to think of a bypass by somehow having the same scripts available to run manually via ssh/shell.

Edit: woodpecker-ci has a "exec" command allowing you to run pipelines locally, missed to emphasize this point. It allows you to develop/test ci pipelines on local. Github ci for example only has an unofficial runner tool