GitLab Incubation Engineering, 3 Dec 2021

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From YouTube: Incubation Engineering Jamstack -- Weekly Demo December 3rd 2021

Description

MR: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-pages/-/merge_requests/626#note_751517868

Weekly Update Issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/incubation-engineering/jamstack/meta/-/issues/5

A

Hi everyone and welcome to this week's jam sec incubation engineering update. I went on a little sidetrack for an issue that bugged me about gitlab pages for a long time. I'm talking about the requirement that the static files delivered by pages need to be placed in a folder called public.

A

You know it can be considered just an inconvenience, something that can be worked around easily, but that is true, but it's not where I want pages to be.

A

Most major frontend frameworks do create an output folder, but it's always called something else. Many call it. This react, calls it build other skus underscore site and so on.

A

So there's always that manual step where you as the developer, have to go in and reconfigure your framework so to instead use a folder named public in order to make it work with gitlab pages, and we had some issues open because if you missed that critical step, it's really hard to debug and the documentation is a bit thin on the issue.

A

So we could improve the docs, but I wanted to get this issue at its root. After doing some digging, I found out that there is actually no real reason for that requirement other than the fact that the root folder called public is hard coded in pages.

A

So what I've did is I've created an mr that would solve this issue, we're still having a few discussions on? What's the most performant or elegant approach to implement it, but the basic idea stays the same. If I define only one artifact filled in the pages pipeline, that will be the root folder for your site, static files.

A

So, for example, if I have a react app and the build creates a folder called build, I can use that folder as an artifact.

A

If I have an app built with bit, it'll create a folder called dist, so I can use this in here.

A

If there is only one folder in here like it can be named whatever you want, that's the one pages will use. This is the perfect solution to just have it just work.

A

Theoretically, it's possible to also upload multiple folders to artifacts. I'm not sure why that would be useful, but I want to keep backwards compatibility. So here's my suggested approach for that: let's call it an edge case.

A

We know the most popular frameworks default, build output, folder names, so we will just check for the presence of one of those among the artifacts and then use that almost all widely used frameworks use one of these folder names on this list, so we can make pages just work and without adding any additional configuration.

A

I think this would be a pretty amazing user experience.

A

The mr from my suggestion is currently in an early draft and I've added the link in the video description um now collecting feedback on its implementation. So please come to me with any suggestions. um If you have a suggestion, just add a comment on the mr and help me get through this.

A

This is definitely going to be big and I hope it will be a great improvement for all our gitlab pages users.

A

This was it for the update for now, and I will see you all next week.