GitLab Solutions Architecture, 13 Jan 2022

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From YouTube: Enabling GitLab Pages for a Single Domain

Description

This post aims to describe how you can avoid needing a wildcard certificate and DNS entry for GitLab Pages while still enabling its functionality.

#gitlab_pages

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Hi everyone, my name is tim poffenberger and I work within the solutions, architecture organization at get lab, and today I wanted to share how to leverage gitlab pages for a single domain rather than leveraging a wildcard domain.

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If you're unfamiliar with gitlab page's offering it is a capability within gitlab that allows you to build and publish static sites, so sites that are built typically using a static site generator and not utilizing any sort of server side componentry and which allows you to serve up sites through html, css and javascript and how it how it works within gitlab is you can create a sample project and uh utilizing a template or from other another project or build something yourself.

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You can run a pipeline on that project and it will automatically publish a static site for you, so that when you, uh you can then visit that this is enabled by default on gitlab.com for self-managed users. However, it's important to to be able to set this up and how this construct works. Is this say that you have a page's domain of gitlab.io, which is the the domain?

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That's used for gitlab.com static sites, and you have a top level group name within your get lab projects within your gitlab instance called artemis, and you have a project name within artemis called wiki. What will happen? Is uh this top level group name? Will prepend the the get lab.io and the wiki will then uh be appended at the end of that as a part of the project path, so the full url for pages would then be artemis.gitlab.io forward, slash wiki for your gitlab.com instance. This would be gitlab.com forward.

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Slash artemis forward, slash wiki to get to that project.

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Setting up get lab pages, we have a few different options. All of them typically require that wildcard domain, because we don't know the names of your top level groups of in what they're going to be called. So we want to account for all groups being set up accordingly. Sometimes, however, our customers need to they don't have access to either provisional wildcard dns entry or they don't have access to provision a wildcard ssl certificate.

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So in this scenario, what I'm doing is creating a single group within a top level group called pages within my gitlab instance. So you can see that it's that the top level group here and it's going to have projects and all these projects are now going to be.

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Capable of serving static sites through gitlab pages.

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The way that we go about doing this is.

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Within our gitlab configuration, uh so this right now we're looking at the gitlab.rb file and there's a section dedicated to get lab pages that you can navigate to, and I've uncommented and added to or modified two lines. This page's external url and, interestingly enough, I'm I'm providing a top level domain, because gitlab is going to assume that it has full access to all all sub domains. A part of this top level domain.

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But if you wanted to, you could also use a sub sub domain, which would then have access to all of their sub sub domains, but again, remember that what we're going to do is we're only going to provision a single sub domain uh here called pages.1008.com, and we're also going to enable it on this second line here, as I'm using uh the docker instance of of gitlab.

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All I needed to do was restart my docker container and it would it automatically applied these changes.

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So here you can see uh two sample projects I'll take a look at this wiki project within here. I copied this from that template and you can actually see the the static site pages page for this.

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This template and it came with a public directory and a gitlab yaml file, and this gitlab aml file has a single job to it. If I look at the cicd pipeline, though, you can actually see two jobs.

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One of them is that job that was created, but gitlab pages when it is enabled you will see this pages deploy in it. It copied over the content generated here into the the get lab pages space. If this job runs successfully- and you do not see this job get created, that tells me that your get lab pages instance is not set up correctly and you'll. You need to troubleshoot that before you proceed, the gitlab pages administration page walks you through how to how to set that up.

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Typically again, it's with wildcard domains, but for this particular instance, if I ping pages.108.com, uh it is the only uh subdomain of 100a.com. That's going to going to return this address. All other 1008 queries will will fail to resolve, because I have not set up a wild card for this particular domain in action. You can see that again.

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This is the top level group pages.1008 and the project wiki, and it served it appropriately and now, if I wanted to so I'm going to go back to my page's top level group and I'm going to click on new project and I'm going to create from template and I'm going to scroll down to pages plain html use this template and I'm going to call this demo and we can and I'll make it public and I'm going to create this project.

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It's going to import this project from that template repository.

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And now you can see that there is the files are there and I need to manually run that ci pipeline the first time or I just modify a file and it will automatically kick off a pipeline.

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But I'm going to run this pipeline and you can see this page's job gets created. But you see no pages colon deploy job, because that is what uh the get lab pages functionality is actually driving that job and it will kind of magically appear within here.

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And now you see that pages has completed and that page's deploy is complete. So my assumption now is: I can navigate to pages.108.com forward slash demo and receive a site.

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And there we go. Thank you for joining. If you have any questions, feel free to.

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Reach out to our forum, and I'm sure people are happy to answer you. There take care.