Processor (US only)

For processors that deal with US Government Zendesk (or require US citizens only), we need to do a bit of special setup.

The process for setting all this up comes in five steps:

1. Create the source project
2. Create the target project
3. Mirror the source to the target
4. Checking the target project settings
5. Setup the pipeline trigger

Create the source project

To begin, you need to create the source project. To do this, first navigate to gitlab-support-readiness/processors and click the blue New project button at the top-right of the page.

This will bring you to the new project page, showing various options to assist in the project’s creation. The option you want is Create blank project. After clicking that, you will need to fill out some information. It should be as follows:

• Project name: A name that specifies what the form is form
• Project URL: You are fine to allow gitlab.com to populate this for you
• Project deployment target (optional): Leave this as is and do not modify it
• Visibility Level: Private
• Project Configuration: Uncheck all boxes

After ensuring all that is solid, click the blue Create project button. This will result in an empty project being created.

You will want to double check all the settings being used are accurate before proceeding.

After confirming the settings, you will want to create a merge request with the desired code. Make sure to setup the .gitlab folder and its contents for the project!

Once that merge request has been successfully merged into the default branch, you are good to move onto the next step.

Create the target project

As this requires US citizens only, we need this to run from ops.gitlab.net out of the gitlab-com/support/processors-us-citizen-only group.

To do this, first navigate to gitlab-com/support/processors-us-citizen-only. and click the blue New project button at the top-right of the page.

This will bring you to the new project page, showing various options to assist in the project’s creation. The option you want is Create blank project. After clicking that, you will need to fill out some information. It should be as follows:

• Project name: A name that specifies what the form is form
• Project URL: You are fine to allow gitlab.com to populate this for you
• Project deployment target (optional): Leave this as is and do not modify it
• Visibility Level: Private
• Project Configuration: Uncheck all boxes

After ensuring all that is solid, click the blue Create project button. This will result in an empty project being created.

Mirror the source to the target

Next, we need to mirror the code from the source project to the target project. To do this, we first need to create an access token in the target project to allow the source project to act as a push mirror. The steps to do this are as follows:

1. Navigate to the target project
2. Hover over Settings at the bottom-right of the page
3. Click Access Tokens
4. Click Add new token
5. Set Token name to Mirror from URL (replacing URL with the full project URL of the source project)
6. Set Expiration date to be a year from now, as that is the maximum allowed (you can also just click the X on the field to have GitLab default to that)
7. Set Select a role to Maintainer
8. Click the following boxes under Select scopes
   • api
   • write_repository

After doing so, click the blue Create project access token. This will then update the page to show your new token entry under Active project access tokens, as well as have an area above that containing the project access token. Copy this somewhere you won’t lose it for now (such as a notepad), as you will need it in the next steps.

Before leaving the project, you will also want to copy the Clone with HTTPS value for the target project. You can find this on the main page of the project by clicking the blue Code button and copying the value from there. Make sure to copy it somewhere you won’t lose it for now (such as a notepad), as you will need it in the next steps.

With both of these in hand, navgiate to the source project, hover over Settings, and click Repository. You will then locate the section Mirroring repositories and click Expand next to it. Click Add new to proceed in setting up the mirroring.

For the options present, you need to fill out the following:

• Git repository URL: The Clone with HTTPS value from the target project
• Mirror direction: Push
• Authentication method: Username and Password
• Username: jcolyer
• Password: The access token you generated earlier
• Keep divergent refs: Leave it unchecked
• Mirror branches: Mirror only protected branches

With those in place, click the blue Mirror repository button. This should refresh the page, showing your new mirror setup is created under the Mirroring repositories section. To finish this off, click the Update now button (the swirly arrow next to the red trash can) for the newly setup mirror to force it to update. Wait a bit and refresh the page you are on to see the results. Once it shows it has updated (under the Last successful update area), navigate to the target project to confirm the files are present.

With all that solid, proceed to the next step.

Checking the target project settings

You will want to double check all the settings being used are accurate before proceeding. That said, many of these will not populate until the mirror setup has been completed. Thus the lateness of this stage.

With that done, you are good to move the final step.

Setup the pipeline trigger

You will now configure any needed CI/CD variables in the project’s settings. To do that, hover over Settings on the project and click CI/CD. You will then navigate to the Variables section and click Expand. For each variable you need (determined by your code and setup), you need to click the Add variable button to bring up a sub-menu. When doing these, ensure you uncheck the Protect variable box, uncheck the Mask variable box, and check the Expand variable reference box. Once you have entered your Key and Value, click the blue Add variable button.

The final step will be creating the pipeline trigger token that will be used to call upon the processor. To do that, hover over Settings on the project and click CI/CD. You will then navigate to the Pipeline trigger tokens section and click Expand. You will then click the Add new token button and enter a description that details what it is for (if using as a webhook, for example, perhaps state the name of the webhook or the trigger that call it). Once you have done so, click the blue Create pipeline trigger token button to generate the pipeline trigger token. Make sure to copy it somewhere like a notepad for use in whatever mechanism is calling the pipeline trigger. The info below the token contains various examples in how to use it.

Once that is done, so is the project setup!

NOTE You probably need to update some form of our handbook for this new project, so make sure that gets done!

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