How to publish builds to Artifactory from GitLab CI?

Question

I am looking for an easy and clean way to publish artefacts build with GitLab CI onto Artifactory.

I was able to spot https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus/blob/af8af9552966348a15dc1bf488efb29a8ca27111/lib/omnibus/publishers/artifactory_publisher.rb but I wasnt able to find any documentation regarding how I am supposed to configure it to make it work.

Note: I am looking for a gitlab_ci.yaml approach, not as in implementing it externally.

Answer 1

At a basic level, this can be done with the JFrog CLI tools. Unless you want to embed configuration in your .gitlab-ci.yml (I don't) you will first need to run (on your runner):

jfrog rt c

This will prompt for your Artifactory URL and an API key by default. After entering these items, you'll find ~/.jfrog/jfrog-cli.conf containing JSON like so:

    {
      "artifactory": {
        "url": "http://artifactory.localdomain:8081/artifactory/",
        "apiKey": "AKCp2V77EgrbwK8NB8z3LdvCkeBPq2axeF3MeVK1GFYhbeN5cfaWf8xJXLKkuqTCs5obpzxzu"
      }
    }

You can copy this file to the GitLab runner's home directory - in my case, /home/gitlab-runner/.jfrog/jfrog-cli.conf

Once that is done, the runner will authenticate with Artifactory using that configuration. There are a bunch of other possibilities for authentication if you don't want to use API keys - check the JFrog CLI docs.

Before moving on, make sure the 'jfrog' executable is in a known location, with execute permissions for the gitlab-runner user. From here you can call the utility within your .gitlab-ci.yml - here is a minimal example for a node.js app that will pass the Git tag as the artifact version:

stages:
  - build-package
build-package:
  stage: build-package
  script:
    - npm install
    - tar -czf test-project.tar.gz *
    - /usr/local/bin/jfrog rt u --build-name="Test Project" --build-number="${CI_BUILD_TAG}" test-project.tar.gz test-repo

Answer 2

If you're building with maven this is how I managed to do mine:

Note: you need to have your artifactory credentials (user and pass) ready.

1. Create a master password and generate an encrypted password from it. The procedure on how to create a masterpassword can be found here

2. In your pipeline settings in gitlab, create 2 secret variables, one for the username and the other for your encrypted password.

3. Update or create a settings.xml file in .m2 directory for maven builds. Your settings.xml should look like this:

   <settings xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.1.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/settings-1.1.0.xsd" xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.1.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
     <servers>
       <server>
         <id>central</id>
         <username>${env.ARTIFACTORY_USER}</username>
         <password>${env.ENCRYPTED_PASS}</password>
       </server>
     </servers>
   </settings>
   

4. In your .gitlab-ci.yml file, you need to use this settings.xml like this:

   image: maven:latest
   
   variables:
     MAVEN_CLI_OPTS: "-s .m2/settings.xml --batch-mode"
     MAVEN_OPTS: "-Dmaven.repo.local=.m2/repository"
   
   cache:
     paths:
       - .m2/repository/
       - target/
   
   build:
     stage: build
     script:
       - mvn $MAVEN_CLI_OPTS compile
   

and that's it. This should work. You can visit here for more about how to use artifactory with maven

Answer 3

I know this doesn't exactly answer your question, but I got to this question from a related search, so I thought it might be relevant to others too:

I ended up using an mvn deploy job that was bound to the deploy stage for gitlab.

Here is the relevant job portion:

deploy:jdk8:
  stage: test
  script:
    - 'mvn $MAVEN_CLI_OPTS deploy site site:stage'
  only:
    - master
  # Archive up the built documentation site.
  artifacts:
    paths:
    - target/staging
  image: maven:3.3.9-jdk-8