inotify-pipeline-trigger

A small script that can be run in a sidecar container to trigger a GitLab pipeline when new files appear in a configured location.

It uses the Linux kernel's inotify facilities so it should be really lightweight.

Installation

If you want to run the script itself directly (not as a container), you'll need to install requirements:

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

See below for how to run the script.

Usage

Set the following environment variables:

Env var	Description	Example
PIPELINE_URL	The URL pointing to a project's pipeline to trigger	https://gitlab.example.org/api/v4/projects/102/trigger/pipeline
PIPELINE_TOKEN	A GitLab pipeline trigger token ("glptt") that allows the pipeline to be triggered	glptt-42df22923d789fa9f13fb00483d40b4ae0526959
WATCH_DIR	The directory to watch	/tmp/triggerfiles

Then run the script with:

./trigger-pipeline.py

Via container

This also comes packaged as a container available from ghcr.io/vshn/inotify-pipeline-trigger.

See the registry for more available versions.

It should run on any OCI-compatible container runtime and doesn't need any special privileges beyond network access to wherever your GitLab lives, obviously.

Caveats and warnings

This is certainly very primitive and non-Pythonic code. There is no input sanitization on things passed via the env vars. The error handling is at its most basic.