Run gitlab-ci-local from Jest

[pismy]

Context of the request

I am the original creator and maintainer of to-be-continuous, a set of 50+ ready-to-use, configurable, modular and composable CI/CD templates for GitLab.

One of the difficulties with that project is the (un)ability to implement an automated test harness.
Indeed, testing CI/CD templates requires to use all the features of the template, with all possible configurations, and verify it behaves as expected (jobs are successful, produce the expected artifacts and reports, ...)

An initial Proof-of-Concept has been implemented in to-be-continuous that demonstrates gitlab-ci-local can be used to mock specific template configuration and execution.

What I need

In the initial Proof-of-Concept, gitlab-ci-local is executed as an external program, the pipeline execution outcomes can be captured as a whole (stdout) or from the filesystem (generated artifacts).

What I would like instead:

• write my to-be-continuous unit tests using a popular Node.js testing framework such as Jest
• import gitlab-ci-local as a Node library
• interact with gitlab-ci-local directly with Node classes
• be able to retrieve and crawl all the gitlab-ci-local execution outputs (generated artifacts, pipeline and jobs execution status, stdout, stderr...) with programmatic structures (interfaces, objects, maps, ...) in order to be able to implement my test assertions properly.

Maybe what I'm asking is already (partially) possible, but I'm far from being a Node expert 😅

[pismy]

@firecow you've answered me:

It's definitely possible to start gitlab-ci-local from within jest 👍 Have a look at tests/ etc. etc.

That's what I've tried, but I'm really a noob with Node.js, and I couldn't find a simple way of importing / requiring gitlab-ci-local internal classes.
It seemed to me that - as a Node package - gitlab-ci-local doesn't do the necessary to export properly its classes.
But I'm probably wrong.

Could you suggest me a minimal Node project that imports gitlab-ci-local and runs a basic pipeline and retrieves execution stdout ?

🙏

[pismy]

Hey @firecow
Good news: we finally managed to use gitlab-ci-local from Jest tests.
We'll start building a unit testing tool on top of gitlab-ci-local.
We'll come back to you with Pull Requests to cover a few needs we have.

[ShuP1]

Here it is: https://gitlab.com/to-be-continuous/tools/gitlab-ci-test

Publishing to npm and dockerhub is still pending but it works

[firecow]

Hey, @pismy I've been out skiing for a while, so haven't had time to peak in.
Excellent that you figured it out 😄

[pismy]

Skiing ❤️

Right.
Actually @ShuP1 made all the magic (I'm such a noob with Node).
Now we'll probably come back to you with some PRs to ease implementing our test assertions.

I'm wondering whether the tool @ShuP1 is building based on gitlab-ci-local would be useful for others 🤔
It's a GitLab CI testing tool/framework (you can either develop your tests in Jest JS/TS or in YAML)
See: https://gitlab.com/to-be-continuous/tools/gitlab-ci-test

[firecow]

Perhaps it will be useful for others that have massive amounts of .gitlab-ci.yml 😄