Oracle AI cloud - develop local Pillow applications

Oracle AI Cloud provides by default a solution for developers who want to develop and deploy applications that make use of Pillow. Pillow is the friendly PIL fork by Alex Clark and Contributors. PIL is the Python Imaging Library by Fredrik Lundh and Contributors. Even though developing your code in the Oracle cloud makes sense in some cases, however, developing on your local workstation makes a lot more sense from time to time.

To start developing Pillow based applications the most easy way is to install pillow in a local Oracle Linux vagrant box. Setting up a local Oracle Vagrant box is relative straightforward and already discussed a couple of times in this blog.

Installing Pillow
Installing Pillow can be done by using pip, you can use the below example on how you need to install Python Pillow on Oracle Linux using pip.

[root@localhost site-packages]# pip install Pillow
Collecting Pillow
  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/00/49/a0483e7308b4b04b5a898789911dbb876d9fea54e7df0453915e47744cfd/Pillow-5.1.0-cp27-cp27mu-manylinux1_x86_64.whl (2.0MB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 2.0MB 190kB/s 
Installing collected packages: Pillow
Successfully installed Pillow-5.1.0
[root@localhost site-packages]#

As you can see, pip will take care of installing Pillow and gives you a ready to environment to start developing. This will help you to develop locally on projects you can deploy later on the Oracle AI Cloud. 

Oracle Linux - register GitLab Runner

Automation of the development process and including CI/CD processes in your development and deployment cycle is more and more common. One of the solutions you could use is GitLab CI to build automated pipelines. For companies who want (need) to maintain a private repository and cannot use, as an example, github.com for storing their source code GitLab is a very good tool. As part of GitLab you can use GitLab Ci for pipeline automation.

Using GitLab CI and the Gitlab runners takes away (for a part) the need to include tooling such as Jenkins in your landscape. You can instruct your Gitlab Runners to execute certain task and control run the pipeline. For this to work you need to install the runner and register it against your GitLab repository.

In our case we run the GitLab repository on an Oracle Linux 7 instance and we also have the GitLab runner installed on a (seperate) Oracle Linux 7 instance. After installation you will have to take the below steps to register your runner against the GitLab repository. This is done on the GitLab runner instance.

[root@gitlab ~]# gitlab-runner register
Running in system-mode.                            
                                                   
Please enter the gitlab-ci coordinator URL (e.g. https://gitlab.com/):
http://192.168.56.3/
Please enter the gitlab-ci token for this runner:
5gosbE5T2XJxtzXr_b_h
Please enter the gitlab-ci description for this runner:
[gitlab.devnet.terminalcult.org]: runner_0  
Please enter the gitlab-ci tags for this runner (comma separated):
all
Whether to run untagged builds [true/false]:
[false]: true
Whether to lock the Runner to current project [true/false]:
[true]: true
Registering runner... succeeded                     runner=5gosbE5T                
Please enter the executor: docker, parallels, shell, virtualbox, kubernetes, docker-ssh, ssh, docker+machine, docker-ssh+machine:
[docker, parallels, shell, virtualbox, kubernetes, docker-ssh, ssh, docker+machine, docker-ssh+machine]: shell
Runner registered successfully. Feel free to start it, but if it's running already the config should be automatically reloaded! 
[root@gitlab ~]# 

The token you need to provide you can get from the GitLab repository. The below image shows the token and the location where you can obtain the code.

The same page can be used to change settings to your runners after they are deployed.