The missing GitLab build radiator view

Introduction

gitlab-radiator is a small Node.js application for serving a Jenkins Radiator View inspired web view of your team's CI pipelines fetched from a GitLab CI installation running locally or remotely.

Pre-requisites

• Node.js v18 or newer
• An account in https://gitlab.com or an onsite installation of the GitLab software package.

Installation

npm install -g gitlab-radiator

Usage

Create a configuration file (see Configuration below) and run:

gitlab-radiator

And if you have an onsite GitLab with HTTPS and self-signed certificates:

NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED=0 gitlab-radiator

You might prefer providing the CA file location in configuration instead of totally disabling TLS certificate checking.

Then navigate with a browser to http://localhost:3000 - or whatever port you did configure.

URL parameters

In addition to server-side configuration, gitlab-radiator views can be customized by providing URL parameters. This comes in handy especially when multiple physical screens are pointed to the same server instance.

Multi-screen support

It's possible to split the radiator view to multiple physical screens by specifying the total number of screens and the current screen with the screens URL parameter. The parameter value format is XofY where X is the number of the screen in question (1...total), and Y is the total number of screens (max 9).

Example: http://localhost:3000/?screen=2of3

Overriding number of columns and zoom level

Want to display a radiator view on your own display with different layout from that displayed on multiple displays on the nearest wall? columns and zoom configuration values (see Configuration section below) can be overriden for a single user / browser by providing them as URL parameters.

Example: http://localhost:3000/?columns=2&zoom=0.8

Selecting projects to display based on GitLab Project Tags

Tags can be used, for example, to only include a specific set of projects for a specific display on your wall. Multiple tags can be specified by separating them with a comma.

Example: http://localhost:3000/?tags=old,useful

Specifying an empty tag list http://localhost:3000/?tags= selects all projects which do not have any tags. This can be handily used to select "rest of the projects" that have not been tagged to a specific display, for example.

Configuration

gitlab-radiator looks for its mandatory configuration file at ~/.gitlab-radiator.yml by default. It can be overridden by defining the GITLAB_RADIATOR_CONFIG environment variable.

Mandatory configuration properties:

• gitlabs / url - Root URL of your GitLab installation - or that of GitLab SaaS CI
• gitlabs / access-token - A GitLab access token for allowing access to the GitLab API. One can be generated with GitLab's UI under Profile Settins / Personal Access Tokens. The value can alternatively be defined as GITLAB_ACCESS_TOKEN environment variable.

Example yaml syntax:

gitlabs:
  -
    access-token: 12invalidtoken12
    url: https://gitlab.com

Optional configuration properties:

• gitlabs / projects / include - Regular expression for inclusion of projects. Default is to include all projects.
• gitlabs / projects / exclude - Regular expression for exclusion of projects. Default is to exclude no projects.
• gitlabs / projects / excludePipelineStatus - Array of pipeline statuses, that should be excluded (i.e. hidden) (available statuses are running, pending, success, failed, canceled, skipped).
• gitlabs / maxNonFailedJobsVisible - Number of non-failed jobs visible for a stage at maximum. Helps with highly concurrent project pipelines becoming uncomfortably high. Default values is unlimited.
• gitlabs / caFile - CA file location to be passed to the request library when accessing the gitlab instance.
• gitlabs / ignoreArchived - Ignore archived projects. Default value is true
• groupSuccessfulProjects - If set to true projects with successful pipeline status are grouped by namespace. Projects with other pipeline statuses are still rendered seperately. Default value is false.
• horizontal - If set to true jobs are ordered horizontally to stages. Default value is false.
• auth / username - Enables HTTP basic authentication with the defined username and password.
• auth / password - Enables HTTP basic authentication with the defined username and password.
• projectsOrder - Array of project attributes to use for sorting projects. Default value is ['name'] (available attributes are status, name, id, nameWithoutNamespace, group).
• interval - Number of seconds between updateing projects and pipelines from GitLabs. Default value is 10 seconds.
• port - HTTP port to listen on. Default value is 3000.
• zoom - View zoom factor (to make your projects fit a display nicely). Default value is 1.0
• columns - Number of columns to display (to fit more projects on screen). Default value is 1
• colors - Define some custom colors. Available colors success-text, success-background, failed-text, failed-background, running-text, running-background, pending-text, pending-background, skipped-text, skipped-background, created-text, created-background, light-text, dark-text, background, project-background, group-background, error-message-text, error-message-background (you may have a look at /public/colors.less, the colorNames from config will replace value for @<colorname>-color less variable)

Example yaml syntax:

gitlabs:
  -
    access-token: 12invalidtoken12
    url: https://gitlab.com
    projects:
      exclude: .*/.*-inactive-project
      excludePipelineStatus: ['canceled', 'pending']
    maxNonFailedJobsVisible: 3
projectsOrder: ['status', 'name']
auth:
  username: 'radiator'
  password: 'p455w0rd'
interval: 30
port: 8000
zoom: 0.85
columns: 4
colors:
  success-background: 'rgb(0,255,0)'

Changelog

See releases.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. Kindly check that your code passes ESLint checks by running npm run eslint first. Tests are run automatically for pull requests by Github Actions against a test profile with a few CI pipelines on gitlab.com

Contributors

• Antti Oittinen (codegeneralist)
• Christian Wagner (wagner-ch)