[FIXED] How to install dependencies after automatic deployment from GitLab CI/CD

Issue

I'm taking a stab at doing an automatic deployment using GitLab's CI/CD.

My project has a couple dependencies managed through Composer and I read somewhere that these dependencies (vendor directory) ideally should be added to the .gitignore file so that they're not uploaded to the repository and that's what I did.

When I tested the automatic deployment, the modified files are getting uploaded but I received errors regarding missing vendor files which I expected - so now the question is how do I install these dependencies in the context of the remote server from the GitLab CI/CD environment?

My .gitlab-ci.yml file looks like this:

staging:
  stage: staging
  before_script:
    - apt-get update -qq && apt-get install -y -qq lftp
  script:
    - lftp -c "set ftp:ssl-allow no; open -u $USERNAME,$PASSWORD $HOST; mirror -Rev . /public_html  --ignore-time --parallel=10 --exclude-glob .git* --exclude .git/"
  environment:
    name: staging
    url: http://staging.example.com
  only:
    - staging

Solution

If you look at GitLab's documentation for caching PHP dependencies you'll notice that it installs Composer through the CI. I think you could leverage this to download the project dependencies before uploading them through lftp.

staging:
  stage: staging
  before_script:
    # Install git since Composer usually requires this if installing from source
    - apt-get update -qq && apt-get install -y -qq git
    # Install lftp to upload files to remote server
    - apt-get update -qq && apt-get install -y -qq lftp
    # Install Composer
    - curl --show-error --silent https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
    # Install project dependencies through Composer (downloads the vendor directory)
    - php composer.phar install
  script:
    # Upload files including the vendor directory
    - lftp -c "set ftp:ssl-allow no; open -u $USERNAME,$PASSWORD $HOST; mirror -Rev . /public_html  --ignore-time --parallel=10 --exclude-glob .git* --exclude .git/"
  environment:
    name: staging
    url: http://staging.example.com
  only:
    - staging

Answered By - bassicplays

Answer Checked By - Mildred Charles (PHPFixing Admin)