GitLab CI/CD - setup for LAMP project

We have a regular LAMP project and we recently to moved to Gitlab (instead of Github).

Previously we have been using Jenkins for deployment, now I am planning to migrate it to Gitlab CI/CD.

We have servers A and B (with Loadbalancer) for development version and servers C and D (likewise, with LB) for production environment.

Since it's a LAMP project, the deploy is as simple as that: - latest changes are pulled from repo; - all changed files are rsynced into public web folder; - some utilities like composer and npm are run.

Basically I need to deploy changes to two development VPS and two production ones.

Do I have to install and start runner on each of them? Or is there a more efficient approach?

Solution

There are many approaches possible (I'm assuming your are running on unix) :

Simply create a new server and install the gitlab-runner on it and register it. Install the dependencies on the server itself.
If you are confident with docker, I suggest you to install it as Docker service. For the dependencies, create a docker image adding the utilies and refers the container image in the config.toml advanced configuration with the --image flag. This will trigger a container based on your image for every build.
If you know Kubernetes, use kubernetes executor and build directly on the cluster. You still need to build your own image with dependencies and refers it in the runner configuration with --kubernetes-image

For the deployment, just copy the files on your target servers after the build using tools like scp or rsync. Better (if your LAMP project is dockerized) : build a docker image, push it on a registry and pull it on your server. Even better : deploy all the containers in a orchestrator like Kubernetes.