Bin Tester v4.0.0 was released today with several noteworthy changes, including changing the function exports, changing the argument to the test functions, adding TypeScript type declarations, and deprecating support for Node 14 and 19.
This post details the GitLab CI pipeline used for this blog, which is built with Eleventy. It's based on a collection of GitLab CI templates that have evolved over several years for my published NPM packages with a collection of end-to-end tests used for web applications and a few unique jobs added specifically for Eleventy and Nunjucks templates. It's meant as an illustration of a reasonably comprehensive CI pipeline for an Eleventy static site, maximizing the level of automated testing, leveraging built-in GitLab capabilities where practical, and optimizing parallelization and pipeline speed.
There are some cases where the expected outcome of a CI job script is failure. One prominent use case is the testing of tools and container images that are intended for CI-based analyses. This post details techniques for GitLab CI scripts that will allow the job to pass when the script fails to accurately reflect the expected result.
GitLab Pages provide an easy means of deploying a site hosted on GitLab, but GitLab does not provide support for creating Review Apps for a Pages site. This post outlines a reusable technique to work around that and setup Review Apps with Eleventy to enable creation of a unique, browsable instance of a site with the changes in a merge request.
Gitlab Releaser v5.0.0 was released today with several noteworthy changes, including failing if an empty release description is pulled from the CHANGELOG and a new CLI option to specify the CHANGELOG path.
Google Chrome's Lighthouse tool is a great resource in the browser and has become the standard for basic performance and best-practice metrics on websites. While useful in the browser, a good continuous integration (CI) pipeline includes all the testing practical to identify any issues as early as possible. To that end, this post details how to run Lighthouse via the CLI in GitLab CI and collect a GitLab metrics report so any changes will be reported in merge requests.
It's been well over a decade since I kept a blog here. That's a lifetime or two in software development, but I've missed writing and decided it's time to bring it back. So, this is the kick-off to incentivize me to write more. And it never hurts to have another new project to work on, and something with more web front-end work, i.e. developing a site with Eleventy, hosted on GitLab pages, optimizing the use of GitLab's tooling, and extensive use of automation with GitLab CI.
Aaron Goldenthal