gitlab-ci-local

With GitLab, I have found https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local to be an incredible time-saver when working with GitLab pipelines (similar to https://github.com/nektos/act for GitHub) I wish GitLab/GitHub would provide a way to do this by default, though.

If you are annoyed by gitlab-runner deprecating run command that I used to run pipelines locally, there is https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local . But it also opened my eyes to benefita of having runner invariant pipelines -- pipelines written in solution agnostic way. Use bash, make, just, doit or whatever. Nothing beats having a single script to bootstrap and run the whole pipeline e.g. `make ci`.

Oh, yeah, I remember looking at that a while back. I don't recall how much it had implemented at the time but it seems that firecow took a vastly different approach than nektos/act did, going so far as to spend what must have been an enormous amount of time/energy to cook up https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local/blob/4.56.2/src/s... (and, of course, choosing a dynamically typed language versus golang)

yeah... https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local is a good workaround but should be built-in. How do developers at GitLab/Github debug their workflows?

I've been thinking lately that how I could do some integration testing FOR my CI-pipelines. My client has very complex pipelines which has business logic inside them and every week we run into new bugs and regressions. I can't think any easy way to write tests for them to make it harder to break when developing new features. Btw. Gitlab allows splitting your pipelines to multiple files using include[1]. Also we have used gitlab-ci-local[2] to run our pipelines locally when developing them. 1: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/includes.html 2: https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local

Then maybe this? https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local (I only tried it shortly many months ago before running into some issues, it probably works better now)

> One thing that would be nice, however, would be the ability to run the entire pipeline locally. This cost me many hours of waiting for the Gitlab CI runner when debugging non-trivial pipelines, when the issue was something that did not have to do with the script steps inside of the jobs but rather how the Gitlab runner handled things. I've found gitlab-ci-local [1] which actually does run the Gitlab pipeline locally, although I had to write some boilerplaye scripts to set up all the necessary 'CI_FOO_SOMETHING' environment variables before running the tool. (Which sometimes came back to bite me because the issue was actually in the content of some of those environment variables). It's still a very good tool. [1] https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local