Continuously Deploy Your Frontend using Gitlab and Scotty.JS

My lovefest for Gitlab continues! Heres a quick post showing you how to continuously deploy your React/Vue/Angular Single Page Applications to S3 and Cloudfront, using just Docker, Gitlab and great tool called Scotty.JS.

First save AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY to your Gitlab environment variables (I recommend a special IAM role for this). Then save the files below to your repository and update the placeholder text to what makes sense for your project.

The Dockerfile below performs a multi-stage build that builds the frontend code (Create-React-App) then copies all of it to a directory that Scotty can access.

#Dockerfile
FROM node:8.11.3-slim as node_builder

MAINTAINER @iMichael

WORKDIR /app

COPY /src  /app/src

RUN cd /app/src && \
    npm install && \
    npm run build

FROM node:8.11.3-slim as deployer

RUN groupadd -r react && useradd -r -g react react

RUN npm install scottyjs --global

COPY --from=node_builder /app/src/build /tmp/build

USER react

ENTRYPOINT ["scotty"]

And below is the Gitlab config that ties it all together. Update this with any special logic your team adheres to (like only deploying if all tests pass on the master branch).

#.gitlab-ci.yml
image: docker:latest

services:
  - docker:dind

stages:
- build
- push
- deploy

variables:
  REACT_TAG_NAME: registry.gitlab.com/<user>/<project>/<container-name>:$CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME
  S3_BUCKET: xxxx

before_script:
  - docker login -u gitlab-ci-token -p $CI_JOB_TOKEN registry.gitlab.com

build:react:
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - docker-images
  stage: build
  script:
    - mkdir docker-images
    - docker build --pull -t $REACT_TAG_NAME -f path/to/your/Dockerfile .
    - docker save $REACT_TAG_NAME > docker-images/react.tar

push:react:
  stage: push
  script:
    - docker load -i docker-images/react.tar
    - docker push $REACT_TAG_NAME
  only:
    - master

deploy:react:
  stage: deploy
  script:
    - docker run \
      --rm  \
      -e AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=$AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID \
      -e AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=$AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY  \
      $REACT_TAG_NAME  \
      --source /tmp/build/ \
      --region us-east-1 \
      --bucket $S3_BUCKET \
      --spa

Now every time you push to master on Gitlab (and all tests pass). your code will be deployed to AWS with a Cloudfront URL that you can CNAME to your own domain.

Big thanks to Scotty.js which does all the heavy lifting!