Feature: Add support for GitLab releases

[WarheadsSE]

Summary

Bring a parity of functionality to release on GitLab instances.

Details

GitLab has parallel, if not identical functionality for pages and Release artifacts.

After looking through pkg/github/github.go, most of the necessary functionality is present within the glab CLI (links below) to provide the functionality as needed.

Supplementally, GitLab also has support for Helm objects within the package repository. That can be published to via API calls (example in gitlab/gitlab chart's CI here), but is not currently implemented by an existing library call within glab.

Reference

• glab GitLab CLI: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/cli
  • glab release sub-command
  • release libraries within the project
• pkg/github implementation

[cpanato]

thanks, i will take a look

[xrstf]

FWIW I am trying to get this to work on codeberg.org, a Forgejo (~ Gitea) installation. Codeberg also offers a Pages equivalent. I haven't yet checked for CLI tooling to create a release, but would appreciate if chart-releaser could somehow take Gitea/Forgejo into account as well.

[joshleecreates]

I would like to see this functionality expanded to be more inclusive of git backends.

@xrstf in the codeberg case and similar, is --packages-with-index sufficient to make the packages available or is some API-level release required?

[xrstf]

I can't tell you, I have since moved on to packaging my chart "by hand" by roughly doing

cr package
forgejo release create
helm repo index
git commit
git push

This is because I also have some custom automation to merge Helm repos from multiple Git repos into one single Helm repository.

[joshleecreates]

This is because I also have some custom automation to merge Helm repos from multiple Git repos into one single Helm repository.

This is exactly the use case I am struggling with, how are you merging the index files? Or are you building all of the releases together?

[xrstf]

I have a dedicated git repo that contains my actual, published helm repository (to artifacthub, for example) but is not hosted by Codeberg Pages, but instead on my own server.

In that repo I have a cronjob action that simply walks through all known projects of mine that have a helm chart, gets their local helm repo files (that are only used for this merging process) and merges them together.

Here's the script I run regularly on my server. helm-repo-html then generates my collective helm repo.

Of note is that my workflow is based on setting Git tags, not modifying a chart and bumping versions in a Chart.yaml. But I tried to mimick the remaining logic of chart-releaser when it comes to the GitHub/Forgejo release contents. And for me it's acceptable that there is up to 30min delay between tagging a chart and it appearing in my Helm repo.

Instead of hosting this yourself, you could probably also use Codeberg Pages and a Forgejo Action instead of a cronjob. But I haven't tried that (plus, in my case, all my Codeberg Actions run on my own runner on my server anyway, so why not just use a cronjob directly 😁)