In a previous article I have explained how to setup GitLab in Docker behind Nginx. In this article I want to explain how you can use GitLab to do continuous delivery for different kind of projects.

There are several options available to install GitLab on your server. The recommended way by GitLab is to use GitLab Omnibus, but this will bundle with an included Nginx server. If you already have your own instance of Nginx you probably do not want to install another one - it cannot listen on the default ports anyway. Thus, you have to look for another method to install GitLab. Another possibility would be to install GitLab from source. In this case however, you will have to install PostgreSQL, Redis and Nodejs.

When you’re running websites or any other service you want to know its state at any time and be informed when something goes wrong. For example, I started molescrape almost one year ago and during long-term website crawling you need some form of application monitoring. During the first few days, you might check the status of the crawling manually, but some weeks later you won’t. And at some point in time your application will fail. And you will need to notice, or you will go days or even weeks without noticing. In this article I will give a short overview over monitoring solutions (especially simple ones for hobby projects) and introduce my own monitoring solution.

At my scraping platform molescrape.com, I have setup a constant monitoring of the number of items collected per spider to detect when a spider fails (e.g. because of system problems or because the website changed). Currently, the threshold has to be set manually for each newly added spider. As this is increased effort for the user, I have been working on a system to automatically detect a useful threshold.