Custom Distributed Task Execution on GitLab
Using Nx Agents is the easiest way to distribute task execution, but it your organization may not be able to use hosted Nx Agents. With an enterprise license, you can set up distributed task execution on your own CI provider using the recipe below.
Run Custom Agents on GitLab
Run agents directly on GitLab with the workflow below:
1image: node:18
2
3# Creating template for DTE agents
4.dte-agent:
5 interruptible: true
6 cache:
7 key:
8 files:
9 - yarn.lock
10 paths:
11 - '.yarn-cache/'
12 script:
13 - yarn install --cache-folder .yarn-cache --prefer-offline --frozen-lockfile
14 - yarn nx-cloud start-agent
15
16# Creating template for a job running DTE (orchestrator)
17.base-pipeline:
18 interruptible: true
19 only:
20 - main
21 - merge_requests
22 cache:
23 key:
24 files:
25 - yarn.lock
26 paths:
27 - '.yarn-cache/'
28 before_script:
29 - yarn install --cache-folder .yarn-cache --prefer-offline --frozen-lockfile
30 - NX_HEAD=$CI_COMMIT_SHA
31 - NX_BASE=${CI_MERGE_REQUEST_DIFF_BASE_SHA:-$CI_COMMIT_BEFORE_SHA}
32 - NX_CLOUD_DISTRIBUTED_EXECUTION_AGENT_COUNT=3 # expected number of agents
33
34 artifacts:
35 expire_in: 5 days
36 paths:
37 - dist
38
39# Main job running DTE
40nx-dte:
41 stage: affected
42 extends: .base-pipeline
43 script:
44 - yarn nx-cloud start-ci-run --distribute-on="manual" --stop-agents-after=e2e-ci
45 - yarn nx-cloud record -- nx format:check --base=$NX_BASE --head=$NX_HEAD
46 - yarn nx affected --base=$NX_BASE --head=$NX_HEAD -t lint,test,build,e2e-ci --parallel=2
47
48# Create as many agents as you want
49nx-dte-agent1:
50 extends: .dte-agent
51 stage: affected
52nx-dte-agent2:
53 extends: .dte-agent
54 stage: affected
55nx-dte-agent3:
56 extends: .dte-agent
57 stage: affected
58This configuration is setting up two types of jobs - a main job and three agent jobs.
The main job tells Nx Cloud to use DTE and then runs normal Nx commands as if this were a single pipeline set up. Once the commands are done, it notifies Nx Cloud to stop the agent jobs.
The agent jobs set up the repo and then wait for Nx Cloud to assign them tasks.
The agents and the --parallel flag both parallelize tasks, but in different ways. The way this workflow is written, there will be 3 agents running tasks and each agent will try to run 2 tasks at once. If a particular CI run only has 2 tasks, only one agent will be used.