Short introduction to a CI Stack we love. Gitlab + Surf + Ansible + proServer

1. Our proServer ❤ continuous integration
Sebastian Helzle
T3CON16 Munich, October 26th 2016

2. What you will hear about
• Short introduction into continuous
integration/delivery & why you want that
• A lean stack for easy CI/CD (Gitlab, Surf,
Ansible)
• How the proServer can help you
• How we @punkt.de can help you do all this

3. Short introduction into CI/CD & why you want that

4. –Wikipedia
Continuous Integration
In software engineering, continuous
integration (CI) is the practice of
merging all developer working
copies to a shared mainline several
times a day.

5. –Wikipedia
Continuous Delivery
It aims at building, testing,
and releasing software
faster and more frequently.

6. It all starts with change
• A developer fixes a bug
• They commit the change to GIT
• They push to a repository
• And now what?

7. Old way
• Team decides to make a release after a few weeks
• Projects latest version (maybe tested) is
transferred manually in some way to production
• Meanwhile website shows errors
• Caches for TYPO3, Redis, PHP, XYZ are flushed,
apache restarted, solr connections reset, temp
folder deleted, database migrations executed,
etc…
• Something is fixed manually because of a
configuration problem
• An hour later the team hopes the website is now
working correctly

8. –A concerned product owner
So what did we actually
release?

9. We want to understand what’s going on

10. We want to automate and minimize human error
• Put our manual checks into code
• Put our manual tasks into code
• Make everything reproducible
• Make sure the intern can do releases
• Have documented releases

11. New way
• Developer commits
• CI Server does it’s checks
• Verified commits are reviewed and
merged or auto merged
• Auto-Deployment to staging
• Developer tags verified commit
• Auto-Deployment to production

12. A simple CI/CD stack
• Gitlab
• TYPO3 Surf
• Ansible

13. Gitlab
• CI Server
• Git Server
• Free or Self-Hosted
• Optional:
• Ticketsystem
• Wiki
• Static site hosting
• Projektmanagement

14. TYPO3 Surf
• Verified deployments
• Smoke tests
• Automated tasks
• Cache clearing etc…
• Allows rollbacks
• Keeps old releases

15. Ansible
• Infrastructure as code
• Easy to learn
• Almost no requirements on servers
• Minimizes manual work on servers

16. Our proServer is a great base for CI/CD
• Works nicely with Ansible
• You can use it like a root server
• We manage security relevant stuff
• We optimized it for TYPO3 and
Neos projects
• Cost effective!

17. How we @punkt.de can help you
• We offer workshops to help you
setup or plan your CI/CD
• We make the proServer better with
your feedback
• We will provide working setup
scripts for the proposed easy
stack on Github

18. Questions?
Contact Sebastian Helzle
@sebobo
helzle@punkt.de

19. Sources
• Gitlab - https://about.gitlab.com
• Ansible - https://www.ansible.com
• TYPO3 Surf - https://github.com/TYPO3/Surf
• proServer - https://proserver.punkt.de