Mar 03, 2022

CV building automation with Gitlab CI

I was updating my CV to apply for a job, and my yak shaving habit led me astray.

I already wrote my CV in LaTeX and uploaded its source to a personal Gitlab repository. So I was thinking let’s use Gitlab CI/CD to automate the process of building my CV. There are some main benefits:

1. I can update the LaTeX source everywhere and have Gitlab Runner build my CV without having a LaTeX environment.

2. I want to have a record of my CV releases.

Strategy

Let’s get the idea rolling with a draft diagram:

1. After the source code is tagged, the pipeline is triggered. Each tag represents a release with format <date>-<month>-<semantic-version>. For example, 2022-03-2.2.13 means the CV version 2.2.13 is written in March 2022.

2. Gitlab Runner builds the CV in a LaTeX environment and outputs the PDF version in Gitlab’s artifacts directory.

3. Reading the ARTIFACT_URL environment variable from the build phase, Gitlab Runner creates a release pointing to my CV’s URL.

Code

Below is my sample .gitlab-ci.yml configuration:

stages:
  - build
  - release

build:
  stage: build
  image: "listx/texlive:2020"
  script:
    - export THIS_MONTH=$(date +%Y_%m)
    - export OUT_CV=Pham_Hoang_Hiep_cv_${THIS_MONTH}_${CI_COMMIT_SHORT_SHA} # NOTE [1]
    - pdflatex -file-line-error --jobname=${OUT_CV} cv/cv.tex
    - echo "ARTIFACT_URL=${CI_PROJECT_URL}/-/jobs/${CI_JOB_ID}/artifacts/file/${OUT_CV}.pdf" >> build.env # NOTE [2]
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - "*.pdf"
    reports:
      dotenv: build.env
  only:
    - tags

release:
  stage: release
  image: registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-org/release-cli:latest
  script:
    - echo "Getting artifact from ${ARTIFACT_URL}"
  needs: # NOTE [2]
    - job: build
      artifacts: true
  release:
    name: "$CI_COMMIT_TAG"
    description: "Created using release-cli."
    tag_name: "$CI_COMMIT_TAG"
    assets:
      links:
        - name: "CV"
          url: "${ARTIFACT_URL}" # NOTE [2]
  only:
    - tags

Some important notes:

1. Add some salts (e.g. my commit’s SHA) to my generated CV in order not to make release URLs conflict. Reference: here.

2. Pass the ARTIFACT_URL environment to the next stage (release). Otherwise release wouldn’t be able to know the created artifact path.

Result

And here is my result on the Releases page.

Do you see the shiny link to my CV in the Other section?

That’s all folks! Now I should be back to job hunting instead of doing this.