ansible-bender | ansible-playbook + buildah = a sweet container image | Continuous Deployment library

I am working on a CI/CD pipeline which uses a containerised environment.

• On my laptop, everything thing is run within a centos container which contains all of my tools, while the code and configuration reside on a shared volume.
• Most of that shared volume gets pushed up to master when I submit.
  • But, for example, I exclude any python binaries from the virtual environment.
• That same container is used as my "base" container in Gitlab to execute some of my runner stages in order to
  • execute static lint testing of both the code and the ansible config
  • build the final product as a new image with ansible-bender

In order to distinguish the environments, I use a basic shell in the entrypoint.sh which is executed when the container comes up and in that shell, I used an environment variable which is managed by Gitlab: CI_JOB_STAGE. But the shell script doesn't seem to perform in the same way when I run the container locally as opposed to on the runner. Which is crazy, because that the whole point of containers isn't it?

• it's unclear at what point Gitlab mounts the share between the runner host and the container
• conditions testing the value CI_JOB_STAGE don't seem to work even though the values are shown when it printed out with and echo
• for some reason the entrypoint is executed both before AND after the stage executes

I am attaching gists for

• the entrypoint.sh script
• the output when the container is run locally
  • in this case, it see that the virtual env already exist by check for the existence of the activate binary, so that environment is simply activated
  • it then checks for the flask binary to see if it needs to install requirements
  • i know it's primitive, but this is just POC
• the output for the first stage of the runner
  • based on the shell script, it should not install the requirements because that is part of the stage commands anyway
  • I don't believe it actually does do so, because it goes by too quickly, but the message indicates that it went through the condition
  • if [[ $CI_JOB_STAGE -eq "locally" ]] && ! test -f "./env/bin/flask"
    • if the stage is local (false: we clearly see that stage is lint_code)
    • AND
    • flask is not present (well, it won't be, but it doesn't matter because the first half is already false)

The stages still run correctly, but I find this all very confusing. Does anyone have detailed knowledge of how these runners execute?

gists

• the entrypoint.sh for the container
• output of entrypoint when the container runs locally on my laptop
• output of entrypoint and then of the stage commands and then strangely of the entrypoint AGAIN