GitLab Pages and IIB
The recent version 17 release of GitLab has added some enhancements and fixed some issues.
On the of the newer features that has had some improvements is GitLab Pages.
I have worked with a few different teams making use of GitLab as a version control system and as a Ci/Cd tool. I thought that it might be a good chance to try out GitLab Pages, which is part of the GitLab deployable documentation for a project.
Particularly, as already have teams using separate standalone solutions for hosting the deployable documentation that we generate.
We have done previous demonstrations of generating diagrams and content as markdown for use in GitLab as part of setting up a GitHub wiki.
We also did a demonstration of generating BackStage documentation from WMB/IIB/ACE code.
These are not really as nice as doing "true" HTML content. With markdown (or BackStage) we lose a lot of functionality around presenting details back to the teams using our software.
So I wanted to see if it GitLab Pages gives us some more options, as anything that can help with automated generation of diagrams and documentation is good.
Most diagrams are stale by the time they are released. I remember when I had a contract at university (college) where I was updating network design details. I think the parts I did on day one needed to be updated when I finished two weeks later. They had already become stale. Expecting development teams to update documentation outside of the code is prone to drift.
I'm not a big fan of having corporate code in external 3rd party source control. So I'm not sure how the visibility works with private GitLab source code and having public pages.
So it's something that is really useful for this demonstration. As I can make all the pages public for the purpose of a showcase, but not what I would do if I had my companies code held in a private GitLab repository.
But GitLab pages are new, so there is still time for GitLab to work out some of these issues that might limit what teams can do with their tools.
We like to use a consistent demo, so we have take then setup we did where used BDD testing in a GitLab runner for ACE, and then we have then used that code as the basis for this demonstration and generated diagrams and documentation from the same same code.
To make it a bit more interesting, we did add a few more message flows so that we got something that filled the page.
You can find the sample project here:
and the steps for the GitLab pipeline here:
Which includes :
领英推荐
The pages generated can be found here:
You can also find the SonarQube instance we used for the reporting here:
It's just a demonstration site, so there's no guarantee that it will be active.
If you are interested in seeing a walk through and demonstration or ask any questions, I am doing a demonstration next Thursday.
You can register here:
More information on our products and on pricing can be found on our website:
You can also reach me via email at:
Or contact me via the contact page on our website:
Regards
Richard