I’ve been heard of continuous integration long ago, thus I decide to give it a try.
I found the official guideline from GitLab itself, and it looks quite complicated.
End up I follow this article.

Challenge

I’m not going to repeat the original article, here what I wanted to share is the problems that I faced, and it took me days to try and error to make it works.

1. Composer install error

I’ve Nova installed, and it required a json file for authentication purpose.

So what I’ve changed (the original .gitlab-ci.yml is from the original author)

.gitlab-ci.yml

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composer:
  stage: build
  cache:
    key: ${CI_COMMIT_REF_SLUG}-composer
    paths:
      - vendor/
  script:
    - cp auth.json.example auth.json
    - sed -i'.bck' "s/my-username/$NOVA_USER/g" auth.json
    - sed -i'.bck' "s/my-secret-password/$NOVA_PASS/g" auth.json
    - rm auth.json.bck
    - composer install --prefer-dist --no-ansi --no-interaction --no-progress --no-scripts
    - cp .env.example .env
    - php artisan key:generate
...

What I’ve done is just add a few commands to replace the Nova username & password to the auth.json file, the auth.json.example look like below.

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{
    "http-basic": {
        "nova.laravel.com": {
            "username": "my-username",
            "password": "my-secret-password"
        }
    }
}

Then where’s the $NOVA_USER & $NOVA_PASS? Just go to your GitLab project

Settings -> CI/CD -> Variables

GitLab environment variables

Then, in config/deploy.php, add the auth.json to the shared folder, edit the options section (GitHub issue)

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<?php
return [
    // ...
    'options' => [
        // ...
        'shared_files' => [
            '.env',
            'auth.json',
        ],
    ],
    // ...
];

By default, the only .env will be symlinked to shared folder, so now make sure you copy the auth.json file to shared folder in your remote server.

2. Create a new user for deployment

For this part, I was referring to the GitLab article.

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# Create user deployer
$ sudo adduser deployer
# Give the read-write-execute permissions to deployer user for directory /var/www
$ sudo setfacl -R -m u:deployer:rwx /var/www
# Then add to www-data group
$ sudo usermod -aG www-data deployer
# also allow this user to run as sudo
$ sudo usermod -aG sudo deployer

I didn’t allow the whole /var/www to deployer user, so I created a project folder

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$ sudo mkdir /var/www/mysite
$ sudo chown -R deployer:www-data /var/www/mysite

Now, must make sure the rsa private key store in /home/deployer/.ssh/

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-rw------- 1 deployer deployer 2669 Jun  2 11:26 authorized_keys
-rw-r--r-- 1 deployer deployer  301 Jun  1 05:11 config
-rw------- 1 deployer deployer 3389 Jun  1 05:10 id_rsa_gitlab
-rw-r--r-- 1 deployer deployer 1337 Jun  2 08:56 known_hosts

refer to the original article for more info

3. post-autoload-dump event returned with error code 1

Another problem I’ve faced

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> post-autoload-dump: @php artisan package:discover
Script @php artisan package:discover handling the post-autoload-dump event
returned with error code 1

I’m using barryvdh/laravel-debugbar, previously was in require-dev, I solve the issue by just moving from require-dev to require.

4. The command “which npm” failed.

I was struggling with this for hours, end up, it’s due to the interactive & non-interactive shell mode, see here for more info.

Then I realised, I was installing the npm with nvm, this is install as per user.

I solved this issue by removing the npm & node from nvm

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$ rm -rf ~/.nvm

and install node globally. Refer to this article: Installing Using a PPA

GitHub issue

5. No application encryption key has been specified

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production.ERROR: No application encryption key has been specified. {"exception":"[object] (RuntimeException(code: 0): No application encryption key has been specified. at /var/www/mysite/releases/2/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Encryption/EncryptionServiceProvider.php:44)

This is very obvious, the APP_KEY is empty. So I run

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$ php artisan key:generate
$ php artisan config:cache

And I refresh the browser, still getting the same error. I even tried in tinker, and able to get result by

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>>> echo config('app.key');

Finally, I solve it by restarting fpm

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$ sudo service php7.3-fpm restart

6. After deployed, server still serve the old revision

Update your nginx config

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location ~ .php$ {
    try_files $uri =404;
    fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+.php)(/.+)$;
    fastcgi_pass   unix:/var/run/php/php7.3-fpm.sock;
    fastcgi_index  index.php;
    include        fastcgi_params;

    # add this 2 line after `include`
    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    fastcgi_param  DOCUMENT_ROOT $realpath_root;
    ...
}

Then restart nginx

See the explaination here

Hope this article help :)