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GitLab pages - how to use any repo name?

Question

I have a GitLab repo XXX/website-www which contains code to generate a static website.

I am using GitLab CI for continuous integration/deployment.

For now, I have decided to use GitLab pages to host my static website. This could easily change in the future.

I found this simple configuration that I can add to my .gitlab-ci.yml file:

pages:
  stage: deploy
  script:
  - <...>
  artifacts:
    paths:
    - <static_website_directory>
  only:
  - master

This works nicely, but has one issue. The GitLab pages url is now XXX.gitlab.io/website-www.

I need to be able to access this website from a custom domain, and from what I know, this can't be done with the above URL.

I need to have something like XXX-website-www.gitlab.io.

Possible solutions

1) One way to obtain the url I need is by creating a a group named XXX-website-www, and inside, a repo named XXX-website-www.gitlab.io.

This has a couple of problems:

  1. I have to create a brand new namespace for this website, which is separate from my main group namespace.
  2. As I said above, I could easily switch from GitLab pages to another static website provider at any stage and vice versa. Now my group/project names have to change just to allow for GitLab pages to function.

2) Another solution would be to do repo mirroring. I would mirror XXX-website-www/XXX-website-www.gitlab.io from XXX/website-www, but I'm not even sure if you can mirror from another gitlab repo.

This sadly has another problem: the continuous integration will fail on the XXX/website-www repo.

How else can I achieve this?

3) Another solution would be to create a separate XXX-website-www/XXX-website-www.gitlab.io repo alongside XXX/website-www.

I would change the continuous integration for XXX/website-www to do a direct git add/commit/push to XXX-website-www/XXX-website-www.gitlab.io.

I would then do an initial commit to XXX-website-www/XXX-website.www.gitlab.io with GitLab pages CI.

This is quite a hassel, and still has the problem of number 1 above. It also seems messy working with git inside CI.

Solution

  • Another solution would be to create a separate XXX-website-www/XXX-website-www.gitlab.io repo alongside XXX/website-www.

    I would change the continuous integration for XXX/website-www to do a direct git add/commit/push to XXX-website-www/XXX-website-www.gitlab.io.

    Well... you could reference XXX-website-www/XXX-website-www.gitlab.io as a submodule (displayed as a subfolder) in XXX/website.

    Everything could be done, in the CI steps, within XXX/website which would checkout XXX-website-www/XXX-website-www.gitlab.io in its associated subfolder.
    Add/commit/push can be done in that subfolder, provided a similar add/commit and push is done in its parent repo XXX/website