How does the CI/CD job in Gitlab CI have the project folder in the custom docker container and how can I replicate it in GitHub Actions?

Question

I'm going through the course "Scalable FastAPI Applications on AWS and Docker" from testdriven.io, but with a little challenge by using GitHub Actions instead of Gitlab CI.

In the Part 1 -> Tests and Code Quality part, there is something that I don't understand.

More precisely, in the "Code Quality Checks" part.

Here is the content of the service-talk-booking-code-quality job :

service-talk-booking-code-quality:
  stage: test
  image: registry.gitlab.com/<your-gitlab-username>/talk-booking:cicd-python3.11-slim
  before_script:
    - cd services/talk_booking/
    - poetry install
  script:
    - poetry run flake8 .
    - poetry run black . --check
    - poetry run isort . --check-only --profile black
    - poetry run bandit .
    - poetry run safety check

And the Dockerfile of the docker container that is running this job :

FROM python:3.11-slim
RUN mkdir -p /home/gitlab && addgroup gitlab && useradd -d /home/gitlab -g gitlab gitlab && chown gitlab:gitlab /home/gitlab
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y curl
USER gitlab
WORKDIR /home/gitlab
RUN curl -sSL https://install.python-poetry.org | python3 -
ENV PATH=/home/gitlab/.local/bin:$PATH
RUN poetry config virtualenvs.in-project true

When running cd / && ls -Rla in the container when using it through GitHub , here is what I see :

2024-01-26T21:08:23.7347494Z ./__w/talk-booking:
2024-01-26T21:08:23.7347603Z total 12
2024-01-26T21:08:23.7347847Z drwxr-xr-x 3 1001  127 4096 Jan 26 21:08 .
2024-01-26T21:08:23.7348076Z drwxr-xr-x 6 1001 root 4096 Jan 26 21:08 ..
2024-01-26T21:08:23.7348380Z drwxr-xr-x 2 1001  127 4096 Jan 26 21:08 talk-booking
2024-01-26T21:08:23.7348387Z 
2024-01-26T21:08:23.7348582Z ./__w/talk-booking/talk-booking:
2024-01-26T21:08:23.7348704Z total 8
2024-01-26T21:08:23.7348920Z drwxr-xr-x 2 1001 127 4096 Jan 26 21:08 .
2024-01-26T21:08:23.7349137Z drwxr-xr-x 3 1001 127 4096 Jan 26 21:08 ..

There is a talk-booking directory, but it is empty which causes poetry to not work in my GitHub actions.

In the course, how is there a services/talk_booking/ folder in the container since it was not copied in the Dockerfile?

My first guess would be to simply add a COPY step in the Dockerfile, but I think there is a reason there is none in the provided file.

Answer 1

OK, I got it.

Turns out I needed to :

• Checkout the repository

- name: Checkout Repository
  uses: actions/checkout@main

• Run the container as root

container:
  image: kernju/my-image
  options: --user root