Gitlab CI/CD - How to deploy multiple environments from one branch? - deployment

Question

There is a need to deploy project to kubernetes with multiple environments "development,staging,production" and to multiple countries "Germany, France, Spain" (examples).
Until now I have been using pipeline in original project that deploys to germany and it is done with gitlab ci "environment" for "development,staging,production". That part is ok.
For other countries, I mirror the project and add different variables in the mirror project. Then both countries are deployed.
Problem is that each country builds a separate image even though the code base is the same. So for 5 countries, 5 images are built instead of 1 for each environment.
Current solution:
I have determined for now that I will be adding extra_{{country_id}}_{{environment}} environment for each country in the same project.
So then for example, I will build image for development environment and deploy it to extra_GER_development, extra_FRA_development and extra_SPA_development.
For now I have found a lot of info on how to deploy for "development, staging, production", but none how to split it even further.
Question: Is there a better way on how to deploy single image for multiple environments?
Any info about possible solution articles is also appreciated. thank you.

Answer 1

If by image you mean Docker Image, you can build a single image and set 5 or more tags for countries and push different tags to the repository or deploy every tag to their environment.
Since it's a repetitive process, you can also write a shell script and automate the process. You can pass the environments or countries list, iterate over the list and set appropriate tags or deploy them one by one.
Consider having an environment variable that includes all countries; you can write a shell script like the following:
#!/bin/bash
for country in "$#"
do
# set taga
docker tag SOURCE_IMAGE:tag TARGET_IMAGE:tag
# or maybe deploy
...
done
and call this script in the Gitlab CI script:
...
deploy:
stage: deploy
script:
- ./set-country-tags ${COUNTRIES}
...