GitLab Incubation Engineering, 10 Dec 2021

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From YouTube: Incubation Engineering Jamstack -- Weekly Demo December 10th 2021

Description

The Pipeline Wizard MR: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/76128

All Weekly Updates: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/incubation-engineering/jamstack/meta/-/issues/5

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Hi everyone welcome to this week's dram stack incubation engineering update this week. I have really exciting news. The ones of you who keep watching this channel might have seen me float an idea a couple of weeks ago.

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I wanted to make it easy for jamstack developers to deploy a static site to gitlab pages that is done using a gitlab ci yaml file, while using those yaml files are great for configuring all kinds of little details about the deployment. It's usually a hassle writing one from scratch.

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You really have to remember or google the scaffold or you could load a template. Then that template has all kinds of extra settings. You don't need or don't know about, or you forget to set some stuff. So all now it's rather difficult to really get started.

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So what if we created an onboarding journey that just asks you for the important stuff and then builds the pipeline for you.

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Now I did this, and suddenly there was this huge interest from everywhere within gitlab in our incubation engineering channel. I joke that every development effort within gitlab seems to converge on the issue of how to make writing gitlab ci yaml files easier, but I think that's actually correct. This is a user experience issue, that's not just limited to developers or static sites. Every developer, using pipelines could benefit from an onboarding journey like this.

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In the end for every single ci yaml template we have in this repository, we could have an onboarding journey like the one that I had prototype for pages now. While I was wrapping up this, mr for pages, I realized this thing already is quite abstract.

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With little effort, I could put all the things that make this a very pages specific onboarding journey into some kind of config file, and this week I was actually able to make this idea actually work.

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Introducing the pipeline wizard.

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This is the pipeline wizard. It's super exciting. It's a pure front, end view component with a dead, simple api. I just pass it the url or the string of a template file and it should it'll show a wizard ui based on whatever is in that template or conflict file.

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Inside that config file. I can set the things I would like. The user to input, including the labels, help texts type of input. I can put in an abstract version of the yaml with placeholders for the stuff that we get from the input fields that will then get merged into the final yaml file.

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I can divide the inputs into steps to keep the user load minimal and I can give the whole wizard a little title and a description there's also input validation, a check for required fields and so on, and so on.

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So with that config file kind of approach, it's easy for any gitlab contributor to create a wizard like this anywhere inside the gitlab ui no code required.

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You want a pipeline wizard for docker files, write a config file, import, the wizard on a page done same for mobile apps or packages, or servers or anything really. At some point. We could have replace all these static templates with an interactive pipeline wizard and we don't need to stop there.

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We could give the workspace admins, or instance, admins for self-managed gitlab instances the ability to provide their own wizards, so they can have nice easy uis even for the most quirky non-standard pipeline requirements and still be right within the gitlab ui, completely seamless how's, that for how everyone can contribute.

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So, where am I with this kind of thing that I just did um last time I spoke about this, it was an idea that I had just started adapting my pages onboarding journey 4. this week I have opened a draft. Mr the link is in the video description. It still has quite a few to-do items open that I need to patch.

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It's also still missing a full test coverage. If you want to help me get this over the line, please open the mr and find one of the to do's inside the code. Any contribution contributions very welcome. Most of them are actually smaller things that are easy to fix. I'm also looking for volunteers to review this. Mr later, it's a big feature, so I think it's a big, mr, so I'll need a few hands for this.

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Please go ahead and ping me. I'm super excited about this. I hope you are too until then. I hope to see you again next week for the next update and goodbye.