Gitlab Vars CLI

Gitlab Vars CLI is a simple Docker image which can be used to create, update and read Gitlab project variables in your Gitlab build pipeline.

How to use Gitlab Vars CLI

Tokens

To interact with the Gitlab API a personal access token is needed. The token can be set with env variable API_TOKEN.

export API_TOKEN="*******************"

API

As default the Gitlab API url is set to https://gitlab.com/api/v4 or when present to the CI/CD variable CI_API_V4_URL. If you want to use another URL you can change it with the env variable API_URL.

export API_URL="https://gitlab.com/api/v4"

Project ID

For most of the command you can specify the Gitlab project id (--project 4xxxxxxx) as an option. If you do not set the project id the cli will check if the env variable CI_PROJECT_ID or API_PROJECT_ID is set and use this value as project id.

gitlab-vars get FOO --project 4xxxxxxx

CLI Commands

This will create the variable FOO for project id 4xxxxxxx and store the value bar 123.

gitlab-vars create FOO "bar 123" --project 4xxxxxxx

The following command will get the variable value from variable FOO.

gitlab-vars get FOO

The following command will increment and decrement the variable BUILD. The variable has to be an integer.

gitlab-vars incr BUILD
gitlab-vars decr BUILD

This will store the current timestamp in the project variable BUILD for project id 4xxxxxxx. When you want to use a custom format you can pass the argument --format %Y-%m-%d-% H:%M:%S. The default format is %Y%m%d%H%M%S

gitlab-vars timestamp BUILD

Gitlab CI/CD Pipeline

The following Gitlab CI/CD pipeline (.gitlab-ci.yml ) will update the project variables BUILD_COUNTER and BUILD_TIME. In this example the personal access token stores as variable $API_TOKEN, project id $CI_PROJECT_ID and API URL CI_API_V4_URL from Gitlab are used when running the cli commands.

update-build-vars:
  image: rueedlinger/gitlab-vars-cli
  variables:
    API_TOKEN: $API_TOKEN
  script: 
    - gitlab-vars info
    - gitlab-vars incr BUILD_COUNTER
    - gitlab-vars timestamp BUILD_TIME

Note: The variables BUILD_COUNTER and BUILD_TIME must already exist.

Development

Docker

The following command wil build the and run the docker image.

docker build -t gitlab-vars .
docker run -ti gitlab-vars /bin/sh 

Python

pyenv install 3.10.6
pyenv virtualenv 3.10.6 gitlab
pyenv activate gitlab
pip install -r requirements.txt