Just as we can use GitHub Actions to provide Continuous Integration for a rust project hosted on GitHub, we can use the GitLab pipelines to the same for projects hosted on GitLab.
according to the VCS report of Rust Digger 2.45% of all the crates are hosted on GitLab.com, and there are a few hundred other project that are hosted on the GitLab platform elsewhere.
In order to setup a pipeline you need to have a "runner" that will run a Docker container in which the code will run. GitLab.com provides runners free of charge for a limited number of minutes every minute. If you run GitLab on your own server you might also need to set up a Virtual Private Server to be your runner.
Once you have a runner all you need to do is add a configuration file called .gitlab-ci.yml to the root of your git repository.
This is the first example I have that you can find in this project. The results can be found under jobs.
examples/gitlab-simple/.gitlab-ci.yml
run_test:
image: rust:latest
before_script:
- rustup --version
- rustc -vV
- rustup component add clippy
- rustup component add rustfmt
script:
- cargo clippy -- --deny clippy::pedantic
- cargo fmt --all -- --check
- cargo test
First we define the Docker image we'll use to run the tests in. You can pick any image from the Docker Hub. In this example I used the "latest" that already contains rust.
Then I have a number of commands in the before_script section that help me see exactly which version of Rust we are using and that also installs clippy and rustfmt.
It is customary to put all the configuration commands in the before_script section so if something fails it will be easier for us to see if the failure happened
while setting up the environment or in the actual tests and verifications.
In the script section we have 3 commands that are running some simple verifications of the code and all the tests that come with the crate.
One can, of course, do a lot more with the GitLab pipelines, but setting this up will already be a good start.
Rust Digger reports that 1.23% of all the crates are on GitLab without a pipeline. That is, more than half of the Rust projects hosted on GitLab do NOT have a pipeline yet. See the stats and the list of crates on GitLab without a pipeline.
Other
See also the example in the Cargo Guide.
