Testing Gitlab CI Locally

Developing a Gitlab CI pipeline can be a bit cumbersome as you have to push your code to a remote repository to test it. In this article, we will see how to test a Gitlab CI pipeline locally.

Instead of defining a local runner, we will use gitlab-ci-local

What is Gitlab CI Local?

Gitlab CI Local is a tool that allows you to test your Gitlab CI pipeline locally. It is a simple command line tool that will parse your .gitlab-ci.yml file and execute the pipeline locally.

Installation

The installation depends on your operating system, there is the installation for linux based on Debian. See the installation documentation for other operating systems.

sudo wget -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gitlab-ci-local.sources https://gitlab-ci-local-ppa.firecow.dk/gitlab-ci-local.sources
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gitlab-ci-local

Usage

Once installed, you can just run the following command in the root of your project, where the .gitlab-ci.yml file is located.

gitlab-ci-local

That is as simple as that! You can now test your Gitlab CI pipeline locally. This includes both the yaml parsing and the execution of the pipeline.

You can also:

• List the jobs in the pipeline with the --list option : gitlab-ci-local --list

• Run a specific job with the --job option : gitlab-ci-local --job my_job

Next Steps

You can define the variables that you would define in the Gitlab CI/CD settings in a .gitlab-ci-local.yml file.

You can also change .gitlab-ci.yml as the default git ci/cd file.

Tab completion is also available is needed.

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