I run my Apple builds on a small fleet of Mac runners wired into GitLab CI. Most of the pipeline is unremarkable — build, test, archive, upload — and it had been humming along for months. Then our App Store packaging job started failing intermittently, and the failure made no sense: the …

As described previously, we run predominantly SmartOS systems at our data center and that includes using them to run docker in some cases, to quite good effect. A few years ago, multiplatform images started to appear in the docker space, providing the ability to have (mostly) linux arm64 and x86-64 …

Starting with a problem When looking through some recent updates to the Cartographica dependencies, I noticed that some of the updates were not being automatically merged, despite having passed all the tests. All told, not really a big deal, since all I would need to do is maually merge the …

The Goal I recently built out a comprehensive CI/CD pipeline for xcode-sync, a Swift command-line tool that synchronizes Xcode project source groups with filesystem directories. The pipeline handles everything from testing to code signing, notarization, and automatic Homebrew formula updates. The complete flow looks like this: Run Swift tests …

This weekend, I had occasion to build a new python-based utility and leaned in to my existing poetry tooling in order to do so. While starting the new project, I wanted to take advantage of some gitlab automation I'd previously used on other projects, so I figured I'd document it …

I've already written a bit about using renovate to keep dependencies current using Renovate On Prem in Renovating GitLab Repos. This has been working well. However, there are a couple of twists that I figured I'd document in the event that people run into them. For single-repositories with public dependencies …

Most of the system administration work that I do has been automated using Ansible, as I've mentioned in posts here, including Deploying with GitLab. Now that I've got Renovate in place (Renovating GitLab Repos), I am starting to look at how to expand beyond my existing automations in order to …

Over the past week, I've been working on getting my various dependencies up to date in my GitLab instance repositories. The tool I'm using is Mend Renovate, an open-source solution by the folks at Mend (formerly WhiteSource). Let me state up front that I don't love the license here, it's …

I've been doing quite a bit of experimentation with recent features in Xcode lately, especially as regards trying to efficiently run my GitLab-powered Mac Mini build farm. Recently, as I've been doing some work on CartoMobile, I've been updating the testing code there and stole some ideas from the Cartographica …

MRs (Merge Requests) in GitLab are similar to PRs (Pull Requests) in GitHub, although the process and language around them are slightly different. The name specifically refers the the request to merge into another branch from a branch (or repository) that isn't the same. Simple enough. Most of the time …

In June, I mentioned in an article about Docker on SmartOS that we are doing some work with GitLab these days as a replacement for my venerable Gitolite server (and, to an increasing extent Jenkins). Deploying from Pelican I'm likely going to write more on GitLab in the near future …

This spring, there was a some movement on the Illumos/SmartOS front in implementing features to better support running LX zones with Linux variants. Since Docker images (generally) run on Linux underpinnings, support for running Docker images on SmartOS are dependent upon this support working correctly. For those familiar with …