Gitlab Runner cannot retrieve dependency repo in a Powershell executor - powershell

Question

CI Runner Context
Gitlab version : 13.12.2 (private server)
Gitlab Runner version : 14.9.1
Executor : shell executor (PowerShell)
Exploitation system : Windows 10
Project in Python (may be unrelated)
(using Poetry for dependency management)
The Problem
I am setting up an automated integration system for a project that has several internal dependencies that are hosted on the same server as the project being integrated. If I run the CI with a poetry update in the yml file, the Job console sends an exit with error code 128 upon calling a git clone on my internal dependency.
To isolate the problem, I tried simply calling a git clone on that same repo. The response is that the runner cannot authenticate itself to the Gitlab server.
What I Have Tried
Reading through the Gitlab docs, I found that the runners need authorization to pull any private dependencies. For that, Gitlab has created deploy keys.
So I followed the instructions to create the deploy key for the dependency and added it to the sub-project's deploy key list. I then ran into the exact same permissions problem.
What am I missing?
(For anyone looking for this case for a Winodws PowerShell, the user that the runner uses is nt authority/system, a system only user that I have not found a way to access as a human. I had to make the CI runner do the ssh key creation steps.)
Example .gitlab-ci.yml file:
#Commands in PowerShell
but_first:
#The initial stage, always happens first
stage: .pre
script:
# Start ssh agent for deploy keys
- Start-Service ssh-agent
# Check if ssh-agent is running
- Get-Service ssh-agent
- git clone ssh://git#PRIVATE_REPO/software/dependency-project.git

Answer 1

I solved my problem of pulling internal dependencies via completely bypassing the ssh pull of the source code and by switching from poetry to hatch for dependency management (I'll explain why further down).
Hosting the compiled dependencies
For this, I compiled my dependency project's source code into a distribution-ready package (in this context it was a python wheel).
Then used Gitlab's Packages and Registries offering to host my package. Instead of having packages in each source code project, I pushed the packages of all my dependencies to a project I created for this single purpose.
My .gitlab-ci.yaml file looks like this when publishing to that project:
deploy:
# Could be used to build the code into an installer
stage: Deploy
script:
- echo "deploying"
- hatch version micro
# only wheel is built (without target, both wheel and sdist are built)
- hatch build -t wheel
- echo "Build done ..."
- hatch publish --repo http://<private gitlab repo>/api/v4/projects/<project number>/packages/pypi --user gitlab-ci-token --auth $CI_JOB_TOKEN
- echo "Publishing done!"
Pulling those hosted dependencies (& why I ditched poetry)
My first problem was having pip find the extra pypi repository with all my packages. But pip already has a solution for that!
In it's pip.ini file(to find where it is, you can do pip config -v list), 2 entries need to be added:
[global]
extra-index-url = http://__token__:<your api token>#<private gitlab repo>/api/v4/projects/<project number>/packages/pypi/simple
[install]
trusted-host = <private gitlab repo>
This makes it functionally the same as adding the --extra-index-url and --trusted-host tags while calling pip install.
Since I was using a dependency manager, I was not directly using pip, but the manager's wrapper for pip. And here comes the main reason why I decided to change dependency managers: poetry does not read or recognize pip.ini. So any changes done in any of those files will be ignored.
With the configuration of the pip.ini file, any dependencies I have in the private package repo will also be searched for the installation of projects. So the line:
- git clone ssh://git#PRIVATE_REPO/software/dependency-project.git
changes to a simple line:
- pip install dependency-project
Or a line in pyproject.toml:
dependencies = [
"dependency-project",
"second_project",
]