Deploying from GitLab (and so can you)

I've been working on a couple of small projects, and for whatever reason, I just love automating the building and deployment of my work. That kind of automation always feels like such a huge productivity multiplier when I'm working on my own or in a tiny team.

To that end, I've been working on putting the Butler deploy step into a .gitlab-ci.yml file so that I can publish work without needing to worry about my local environment setup.

First of all, here's the file I'm using on a project called "Wrecked" (more on that in another post):

stages:
  - deploy

variables:
  ITCH_IO_USER: "bursaar"
  ITCH_IO_GAME: "wrecked"
  ITCH_IO_CHANNEL: "html"
  WATCH_PATH: "output/Wrecked"
  BUTLER_VERSION: 15.0.0

before_script:
  - |
    echo "Downloading Butler..."
    curl -L -o butler.zip https://broth.itch.ovh/butler/linux-amd64/${BUTLER_VERSION}/butler.zip
    unzip butler.zip -d butler
    chmod +x butler/butler
    mv butler/butler /usr/local/bin/butler
    butler -V
    if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
      echo "Failed to install Butler"
      exit 1
    fi

deploy:
  stage: deploy
  script:
    - |
      if git diff --name-only $CI_COMMIT_BEFORE_SHA $CI_COMMIT_SHA | grep -q "^$WATCH_PATH"; then
        echo "Changes detected in $WATCH_PATH, deploying to itch.io..."
        butler push $WATCH_PATH $ITCH_IO_USER/$ITCH_IO_GAME:$ITCH_IO_CHANNEL--userversion `date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S`
      else
        echo "No changes detected in $WATCH_PATH, skipping deployment."
      fi
  only:
    - main  # Deploy only on changes to the main branch

For this to work, you will need to set a BUTLER_API_KEY environment variable, which is tied to your user account on Itch.io and can be applied on a per-project or per-group basis. I recommend masking this and making it only available on protected branches, so that way it won't show up in your logs.

You can copy this into your repo now and give it a shot, just changing the project and user names. If you find it useful, spot a bug or make an improvement, please let me know!