If you’re like me and use git instead of NPM to host private node packages then you’ve probably ran into a time when you wanted to do a Gitlab CI build but don’t have permission to pull from your private repositories. Luckily Gitlab provides a slick way to deal with this!
This example applies to a TypeScript project I have. First you might have a package.json with the below in the dependencies section.
"a-repo": "git+https://gitlab.com/kmcgill88/a-repo.git#4e08f44b3434d55090a1e90932d8596f84965f5d",
Since this is a private repository, your build will surely fail with an auth error! Insted of using a hacky SSH service account or environment variables with user name and password, Gitlab offers the CI_JOB_TOKEN environment variable. Every build gets a freh, temporary, token to authenticate with other Gitlab private repositories.
All that is needed in a Docker build is to add the before_script tag with the command to override ~/.netrc (only do this in a docker container).
image: node:8.15.0-alpine
stages:
- Test
before_script:
- echo -e "machine gitlab.com\nlogin gitlab-ci-token\npassword ${CI_JOB_TOKEN}" > ~/.netrc
Test:
stage: Test
variables:
MY_VAR: $SHHH_SECRET
script:
- yarn && yarn test
- yarn build
tags:
- docker
Now when the yarn command starts resolving dependencies you are good to go with your private dependency!
Check out the Gitlab offical docs.