GitLab Incubation Engineering, 1 Jun 2023

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From YouTube: Incubation Engineering - Mobile DevOps - May 2023 Showcase

Description

Topic: Creating macOS Runner Images

* Tart - https://tart.run/
* Discussion: GitLab manged macOS images - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/incubation-engineering/mobile-devops/readme/-/issues/128
* Preinstalled tools research - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ci-cd/shared-runners/macos/-/issues/26
* Tart POC Project - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/incubation-engineering/mobile-devops/tart-poc
* Sample MR - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/incubation-engineering/mobile-devops/demo-projects/ios-demo/-/merge_requests/2

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Hi folks, this is the mobile devops showcase for May 2023 in this month's update I'm, going to show a work in progress that aims to make it easier to set up Mac, OS, gitlab Runners for building and testing iOS applications. Tarte is a virtualization tool that can be used to run Mac OS instances on Apple M1 machines, tart can be installed from Homebrew and once it's installed, you can use it to boot. Up a new Mac OS instance from a supplied image. These images can even be hosted in a Docker container registry.

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Here, I run tarte run Monterey Dash Rosetta, which is an image that I created locally.

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You can see that it starts up in just a few seconds and we have a full instance of Mac OS Monterey running it's possible with tarte to start multiple virtual machines, so for a CI system this could be used to test and build on different versions of Mac, OS, xcode or other configurations.

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With the tarte instance running, it's straightforward to register and start up a gitlab runner and have it pick up CI jobs. This approach works for both projects on gitlab.com and self-managed installations.

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Creating a tart image can take some effort so to make it easier for folks we're putting together some tools to automate image, building with the intention that these automations will also be used to create the images for the Mac OS Runners on getlab.com on my screen is an issue with some discussion around this approach, so you can follow along here. Since this is a proof of concept all the automations are in the tart POC project. These will move once it's ready for use to create an image.

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I can use Packer to build the base template, starting with an ipsw file from Apple. This file is a full restore of Mac OS 12 Monterey. This will behave in the same way as booting up a fresh machine from Apple, so we've automated the steps to get through the onboarding process.

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Once this completes, we can start installing the build tools I've broken down these templates into multiple steps, so we don't have to restart the whole process. If something goes wrong, this structure will likely change, but for now this works for a POC.

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The result is an image with all the tools installed needed to build an IOS app with a gitlab runner installed. I can register the runner with my project using the Shell executor and use it to execute a build in this project. I have a sample Mr that was built using one of these runners in this Mr I've removed the image keyword from the configuration and I'm using the tag, MacBook Air M1, to tell the new Runner instance to pick up these jobs when they enter the queue.

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That's all for the demo. Today, as I said, this is still a work in progress, so there's still work to be done to get this to a usable, State I'll continue moving forward on this and hope to have something available in a few weeks in the meantime feel free to follow, along with the issues Linked In, the video description below thanks for watching.