Reana + cern gitlab questions

1

Hi all

I have a small workflow in reana that I want to make run from the cern gitlab repository of the code, and I have two questions:

  • The code that my group is using is located in a gitlab group account. Each user has the code in an individual gitlab account, but we have a “central” code in a group account. Now, following [1] I could connect the reana workflow to my personal gitlab repository. Are there similar instructions for a group account? In particular, how do we deal with passwords (or one of us have to put his/her password) and how to share the reana output with many users (not sure if this is possible).

  • As mentioned, currently my reana account and my gitlab personal repository are connected. Now, it is currently working that if I push my code to the master, it will launch the reana workflow. This is great, but maybe many resource will be wasted if the full workflow will run everytime I make a push to the master. Is there a way to make the reana workflow run if, for instance, there is a pull request name or a push with a specific name.

thanks a lot for the help and the great package you made.
cheers,

[1] GitLab - Documentation

2

Hi @algomez ,

REANA already supports executing workflows from repositories that are part of a group. You should see all of them in the list under Your GitLab projects in your REANA profile page. Please note that you need to be at least a Maintainer of the repository (see GitLab roles), as only maintainers are able to create the webhooks needed to trigger the workflow on REANA.

After enabling the integration with the repository of your choice, all new commits will trigger a new workflow in your personal REANA account. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to share the results between multiple users, but this is something we are working on and that will be supported soon.

Regarding the second question, unfortunately REANA does not allow to choose on which event to trigger the workflow (e.g. new tag, new pull request, etc), but this is something we would like to add in the future. See the related issue on GitHub: gitlab: allow configuring workflow run trigger criteria · Issue #432 · reanahub/reana-server · GitHub

Please let me know if you have any more questions!

3

Hi @madonado

Thanks a lot for the reply and the help.

About the first topic: thanks for the explanation. Does this mean that if I (a maintainer of the repository) link the group gitlab with my REANA profile, only I can see the output of that? What if another maintainer in the project links their REANA profile to the group GitLab? Is that possible?
From my side, I see a possible workaround by including one last step to zip my outputs and move them into a Cernbox folder that I shared with my group. Still, a group functionality is needed in the long run.

About the second topic, I also think it is absolutely needed. From our needs, I think it does not matter if the REANA workflow runs every time we push to the master, but it is definitely a waste of resources since we don’t need this for every single push to the master. I checked the link that you included, but it sounds like this has been there since 2022, is there any rough estimate of when this will be included?

Thanks a lot for the help
cheers,

4

What if another maintainer in the project links their REANA profile to the group GitLab?

All the maintainers will see al the repositories in the list under Your GitLab projects, and if one of them will enable the integration, then all the others will see the integration as enabled. Other maintainers can disable/re-enable the integration, but new triggered workflows will always be owned by the last REANA user that enabled the integration.

Still, a group functionality is needed in the long run.

Yes, I agree. We are currently developing the sharing of workflows between users, and the following step will be to implent groups and the ability to share workflows with them.

I checked the link that you included, but it sounds like this has been there since 2022, is there any rough estimate of when this will be included?

Unfortunately I can’t give you any guarantees regarding when this will be implemented. However, given that you are interested in this, I have bumped the priority of the issue!

5

thanks a lot @madonado
I’ll be looking forward to your updates.