Having created the container, we now need to deploy it to the Google cloud. We create a deploy project. This was created for me, I believe from our Boilerplate Google Cloud Deployment project This project can currently only be viewed from within the University. The gitlab-ci.yml contained the following at the time of writing:

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# Use UIS deployment workflow, adding jobs based on the templates to deploy
# synchronisation images

include:
  - project: 'uis/devops/continuous-delivery/ci-templates'
    file: '/auto-devops/deploy.yml'
    ref: v1.2.0

  # Include template that lints local Terraform files
  - project: 'uis/devops/continuous-delivery/ci-templates'
    file: '/auto-devops/terraform-lint.yml'
    ref: v1.2.0

# Triggered by manually running the pipeline with DEPLOY_ENABLED="development"
# and WEBAPP_DOCKER_IMAGE set to the image to deploy
deploy_webapp_development:
  extends: .deploy_webapp_template
  environment:
    name: development/$DEPLOY_COMPONENT
    url: $WEBAPP_URL_DEVELOPMENT
  variables:
    DEPLOY_ENV: "DEVELOPMENT"
  rules:
    - if: $WEBAPP_DOCKER_IMAGE == null || $WEBAPP_DOCKER_IMAGE == ""
      when: never
    - if: $DEPLOY_ENABLED == "development"
      when: on_success
    - when: never
	
.deploy_webapp_template:
  extends: .cloud-run-deploy
  variables:
    # Informative name for image. This is used to name the image which we push
    # to GCP. It is *not* the name of the image we pull from the GitLab
    # container registry. The fully-qualified container name to *pull* should be
    # set via the WEBAPP_DOCKER_IMAGE variable.
    IMAGE_NAME: webapp

    # Prefix for service-specific variable names
    SERVICE_PREFIX: WEBAPP

    # Variables set by upstream deploy job
    RUN_SOURCE_IMAGE: "$WEBAPP_DOCKER_IMAGE"

    # The name of the deploy component - will be prefixed with the environment
    # name to create a gitlab deploy environment name
    DEPLOY_COMPONENT: webapp

What it does is to take the deploy template from the devops CI templates in the University GitLab (This is publicly viewable as I write this) and use them to deploy using some environment variables to control what is being deployed. We can see the in the deploy.yml the CI is instructed to do a docker pull on the container that we built, tag it with the Google container name, then push it to the Google cloud. There is another entry for staging, but first let’s understand development.

As the comment notes, this is expected to be triggered manually having the following variables set:

Variable Value
DEPLOY_ENABLED “development”
WEBAPP_DOCKER_IMAGE set to the image to deploy

These are set in GitLab when the job is triggered. There are also some variables set in GitLab for the development environment under Settings->CI/CD->Variables Notice they all start with WEBAPP and all end with DEVELOPMENT. This is important as noted in the comments in autodevops/deploy.yml which was included in gitlab-ci.yml.

Variable Value
WEBAPP_DEPLOY_CREDENTIALS_DEVELOPMENT JSON snippet containing deploy credentials. These were given to me when I ran set up.
WEBAPP_PROJECT_DEVELOPMENT Project ID in the Google Cloud. This was given to me, the hands on guide explains how to to create it.
WEBAPP_RUN_SERVICE_NAME_DEVELOPMENT Service Name inside the project. The hands on guide says “etherpad”
WEBAPP_RUN_SERVICE_REGION_DEVELOPMENT Google Cloud Region. e.g. “europe-west1”
WEBAPP_URL_DEVELOPMENT Development URL. This was set up for me.

Going to the URL now shows Etherpad rather than the unicorn picture!

This seems a little backwards - we have deployed the container into some infrastructure. How come the infrastructure was there? I know my colleague created it, but how? That is the subject of the next post.