Templates for GitLab Continuous Integration are provided in the folder ci-templates. These can be included from any repo by using include:project:

The Core pipeline, defined in ci-templates/core.yml, has the following structure:

• Stage: build

  • Check python syntax

  • .industrial_ci template (see the industrial_ci repo), which can be used to define jobs that build ROS packages

    • Needs the ROS_DISTRO variable to be defined

    • If the package has .rosinstall dependencies, they can be installed using the variable UPSTREAM_WORKSPACE

    • Uses flexbotics-base-devel:${ROS_DISTRO} as a starting image

    • Runs scripts/ci_run_entry_points.sh in the AFTER_SETUP_TARGET_WORKSPACE stage, which in turn finds and runs every ci_entry_script.bash script found in the target repo.

• Stage: deploy

  • .ddeploy template (see the ddeploy repo), which:

    • Is run automatically for tags, but can also be run manually on normal commits

    • Calls ddeploy to generate the docker image

    • Renames the image created by ddeploy with different tags and pushes them to the registry.

      • Tag ${COMMIT_SHA} (hash of commit)

      • Tag ${CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME} (branch or tag name)

      • Tag latest only on the default branch

• Stage: .post

  • Check bash/sh script syntax

  • Check Markdown and AsciiDoc syntax

  • Check files have no trailing whitespace and are UTF-8 encoded

  • Check that C++ files follow this clang-format

Using the templates defined by the core pipeline, one can easily define jobs to build the packages in the repo.

More examples can be found in ci-templates/examples.

In the ci-templates/auto-rules folder, automatic pipelines are defined that will try to detect the ROS distro from the branch name and create jobs. For example, if the branch starts with noetic- it will build for noetic. If the branch doesn’t start with any ROS distro, it will build the default distro, which can be specified with the variable DEFAULT_DISTRO. For convenience, some templates are provided that already set this variable. If your repo needs to uses .rosinstall, you can use the templates in the ci-templates/auto-rules/with-rosinstall folder.

The auto rules also allow for using variables to explicitely activate each job:

If a ddeploy.yaml file exists, the auto-rules will add a job extending the .ddeploy template defined

By default, lfs files are not downloaded. If you need to add LFS, include the ci-templates/lfs-pull.yml along with anything else: