Reset / clean workspace between pipeline steps

Drone Support
1

Our pipelines are:

Unit test (which include, install packages, run a lot of test cases, generate cache files, etc).

If the unit test works fine, I need a step to refresh the environment as new (remove all cache and generated files)

Then I can run docker build from the fresh code directly.

How to do that? How to set the pipeline to clean the environment first, then run the docker build command?

2

If I want to clean my project directory locally (on my laptop) I would do something like this:

npm install         # download dependencies
npm run test        # execute test suite
rm -rf node_modules # delete dependencies folder
npm install         # re-download dependencies

This approach can be translated directly to your pipeline configuration:

pipeline:
  test:
    image: node
    commands:
      - npm install
      - npm run test
+     - rm -rf node_modules
+ rebuild:
+   image: node
+   commands:
+     - npm install

There is no automagic way for drone to reset your workspace in-between pipeline steps. This is something you will need to handle manually in your yaml, similar to how you would handle this locally form the command line.

3

Not sure I like it. Anyway, thanks for the solution.

Since the projects are different, python, node, golang, java, or others, rm -f doesn’t always work, because I don’t know where are these temp files generated.

I’d like to find a generic way to deal with it. I prefer if Drone team can develop a new feature that we can active/nominate some pipeline steps in a new/seperate workspace, or totally different agent

an extra option as below:

pipeline:
  test:
    image: node
    commands:
      - npm install
      - npm run test
  rebuild:
    image: node
    commands:
      - npm install
+   workspace: new

Do you think that’s a good idea? Should we include this feature in GA release (1.0)?

4

I am thinking to run the unit test in virutual environment (a docker container) as well, such as kitchen test if Drone doesn’t support this feature currently.

5

The yaml configuration format is largely frozen at this time. I recommend using the approach defined above, where you manually purge the workspace with shell commands.

1 Like
6

Sure, you can close it now if you want.