GitLab Incubation Engineering, 15 Dec 2021

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From YouTube: Incubation Engineering DevOps for Mobile Apps -- Weekly Demo December 15th 2021

Description

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/incubation-engineering/devops-for-mobile-apps/readme/-/issues/40

A

Hey everyone: my name is darby and I work in incubation engineering at gitlab. uh This is the devops for mobile apps demo for december 15th 2021..

A

As always, I've got an issue here that I've created for this demo and I'll link to this issue in the description of the video below, so you can get to it from there. The first section of this issue just talks about the mission for the group, so this is the devops for mobile single engineering group and we're focused on improving the experience for mobile teams building in gitlab. So you can check out the handbook page here and you can check out previous weekly demos here so jumping into today's update.

A

um This is kind of a big update. I'm excited to share what I've been working on. uh This is the um secure files, uploader downloader, and so I've got a merge request that I've been working on and I've got a link to that right here in the issue, and I've got some details below on the apis that are included in this merge request and some examples on how to use them. This is also linked in the the merge request.

A

So what I'll do is I'll kind of walk through this and then I'll show you how this all works and, as I said, the the merge request is is over here, so I've got a bunch of details there and about the data model and then the apis, but essentially what we have right now is a an upload list, delete and then download apis.

A

uh The the idea here and I've got this in the description up here, we'll we'll start with the first iteration of just the apis um and then we'll build into a direct integration with git lab runner and then, following on with that, will be a ui that would support kind of doing the file uploads through through the browser.

A

um So to kind of walk you through how this all works. um I've got my gdk running over here and um I'll, just fire up a quick request. So this is just the get request to the endpoint and this is going to take a private token and then just call to the project's secure files endpoint, and so, if I do that, I get an empty list back because there's nothing in there yet.

A

So what I'll do I've got? Some uh requests set up here, so I'll just jump over this one here is going to post a new file, so this is going to send the file and it's going to give it the name of demo provisioning profile and then um uh the uh and then pass in the file name, and actually, I need to add the extension here. So I'm just gonna do that real, quick, it's gonna be a mobile provision.

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um So if I do that uh we're going to go ahead and then that'll create the file in the uh in the database and then what this does as part of the creation process is it takes the file and then it encrypts it before writes it to the disk.

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um So then, we've got uh we've got that that file encrypted at rest, and then uh we also do uh we also calculated checksum on that file, so that um when we go to actually like ship the file down to the to the user, um we can check to make sure that the the file is what we expect it to be.

A

So now, if I go and run that request again, I'm going to see that I get my file back as part of that list, and so uh so that is uh the other thing that I can do with this is. If I just wanted a specific file, I can request it by the id. So I see over here, the id is six. So if I just pass in six there I'll get the same thing and what I get as part of this payload. So this is kind of the metadata for the file.

A

I get the file name that I that I supplied this download token, which I'll talk about in a second and then permissions, so the permissions is, is really kind of forward-looking to the runner integration. What this will do is when that integration is set up.

A

The runner is going to go and download these files for the project, and then it will set the permissions on those files as it writes them, so you could be, it could be, read only read, write or execute, and so those are the three options we have there and it doesn't doesn't really play into this part of it, but that's kind of setting us up for the future.

A

The download token is this is a short-lived token that gets generated upon request. So when I make this request, we generate a new token and it's a short-lived so that, um if, uh if I don't go and use it within the fixed time period right now, it's set to 30 minutes. If I don't use it, then it doesn't work after that, but we'll need this token to actually download the file when we go to actually get the file content.

A

So what I can do here is so I've got a sample here, and so what this is doing, this is going to actually be the download of the file. So what I need to do here is, I need to set the file id, so this was file id six and I need to get that download token from oops from from that response there.

A

So let me copy that- and we pass that into the token param here and I'm passing in this output option, because I'm using curl, uh if you were to say, download this in the browser, it would um send the file name along with it as part of the attachment header, but this is just gonna gonna, set it to uh demo.mobile provision when I download the file. So we can see what that looks like so we download the file there and you can see it's popped up on my desktop over here and now.

A

If I do a list, we can see that the the files match the same file size and you can see this was the file that I uploaded and then this is the file here that I downloaded so um so that is all working and then lastly, there is, uh I can do a delete request, so I can just send in a delete request, will delete that file and then, if I go and do this again, we're back to where we started so cleaned up, um but yeah the uh the create uh delete and list and then download apis are all implemented as part of this merge request.

A

So that's the the main bits here. I have a section on to do's. So there's a few things that I still want to to work out in how some of the parts of gitlab work in relationship with this feature- and so I've noted those here um if anyone could provide some insight- and some of these that I don't know a lot about that would be helpful.

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um But I'm also looking obviously for for reviews and any other feedback, as part of the process got some notes in here on how to like test this change locally as well.

A

So that's that's kind of the overview um and I guess uh you know maybe the setting the context I I didn't start with that. um The the reason that we want to have this feature here to begin with is so that um teams that are trying to upload binary files to gitlab is part of their pipelines.

A

It's it's kind of a hard process right now, there's no support for that. So so that's kind of uh why we need this feature and it's especially useful for mobile teams, because there's a lot of binary files that are used as part of the code code, signing process and the building app building process. So this this will save folks a ton of time it'll make it a lot easier for them to to work in gitlab that way so coming up next kind of working to gather feedback on the mr and just work through the to-do's.

A

um I think this is a pretty good place, but I want to want to chat with some other folks and see how far we can get in getting this shipped and merged in, um so I'm going to just keep focused on that for for the foreseeable future.

A

If you have any questions, please uh add them into the issue or add any comments you have or just ping me with, with whatever I'm happy to chat. Otherwise this is going to be the last update of the year, so I'll be out for the holidays coming up soon. So look for the next update coming in early january. I hope everyone has a good holiday thanks.