Deploy a Docker image on Rancher with Gitlab CI

I recently started working with Docker images that we build through our continuous integration pipe. Gitlab CI is an accessible and easy-to-use tool and we’ll see how to use it to deploy docker images on Rancher. To start, we will need to set up a docker-compose.yml file that describes the services we want to deploy. This may include a web application, a database and any other service we may need (storage, e-mail, cache, proxy, etc.) On the example below, we will have 3 services:

1. our web application
2. a database service (postgres)
3. a storage instance for the database

version: '2'
services:
  app:
    image: registry.example.com/app:dev
    environment:
      DB_HOST: db
      DB_NAME: app_db
      DB_PASSWORD: a_p4ssword
      DB_USER: postgres
      DB_PORT: 5432
    links:
    - db:db
    ports:
    - 4034:4032/tcp
    command:
    - foreground
    labels:
      io.rancher.container.pull_image: always
  db-storage:
    image: busybox
    volumes:
    - /var/lib/postgresql/data/pgdata
    labels:
      io.rancher.container.start_once: 'true'
  db:
    image: postgres
    environment:
      PGDATA: /var/lib/postgresql/data/pgdata
      POSTGRES_DB: app_db
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: a_p4ssword
      POSTGRES_USER: postgres
    volumes_from:
    - db-storage
    ports:
    - 5436:5432/tcp
    expose:
      - "5432"
    labels:
      io.rancher.sidekicks: db-storage

You will note that we expose our app on port 4034et the database on port 5436. After that, we set our continious deployment processes in the .gitlab-ci.yml file. We will use the tagip/rancher-cli which contains an installed Rancher CLI, the command-line tools for Rancher.

deploy_app:
  stage: deploy
  image: tagip/rancher-cli
  script:
    - rancher --debug up -d --stack "our-app"
    - rancher --debug up -d --force-upgrade --pull --stack "our-app" --confirm-upgrade app

The first line in script  will check that a stack call “our-app” is up in Rancher, if not, it will first create it. The second command downloads (with option —pull ) the latest image built for app  et update the stack (—confirm-upgrade ). Finally, we need to get Rancher credentials so the previous rancher command can connect to the correct instance. We get them from Rancher in Rancher > API > Keys We will put these informations in Gitlab and they will be passed as environment variable on each CI pipeline. We set them in Gitlab at _Settings > Pipelines > Secret variables _

1. RANCHER_ACCESS_KEY: the generated access key
2. RANCHER_SECRET_KEY: secret key associated
3. RANCHER_URL: the URL of Rancher

Et voila, our Rancher stack is now updated through Gitlab CI.

Written by @mikaoelitiana who lives and works in Paris, building useful things with React, Typescript and more.Follow me on Twitter or Github