CircleCI workspaces

The problem

When I created my CircleCI pipeline in my first post I came unstuck passing the built site from one job to another as a workspace.

This manifested in two ways, where I’d made the same mistake in two different jobs.

Deployment issues

The deploy job appeared to work correctly, but when I navigated to the site I was greeted with a 404 error:

HTMLProofer internal link checks

And when I ran the htmlproofer tool on my generated site I was greeted with a slew of errors:

- ./public/public/about/index.html
  *  internally linking to /about, which does not exist (line 0)
     <a href="/about">about</a>

In fact, every internal link was flagged as having a target that didn’t exist. Fishy…

The solution

In both cases I had managed to point the respective tools to the wrong directory, based on a misunderstanding on how workspaces are persisted.

My build job included the following configuration:

  - persist_to_workspace:
      root: .
      paths: public

Which would store a workspace with the structure:

workspace
└── public
    ├── about
    ├── categories
    ...

And I’d then attach and point at them with:

  - attach_workspace:
      at: ./public
  - run:
      name: test HTML files
      command: htmlproofer ./public --allow-hash-href --check-html

…Can you see my error?

After attaching the workspace I had a job containing:

public
└── public
    ├── about
    ├── categories
    ...

Meaning that in both jobs I was pointing to a directory public that contained one child directory public. A sort-of off-by-one directory error.

Updating the config in both cases to mount the workspace to the working directory fixed both issues:

  - attach_workspace:
-     at: ./public
+     at: .
  - run:
      name: test HTML files
      command: htmlproofer ./public --allow-hash-href --check-html

Conclusion

Measure twice, cut once

As always, the issues that I seem to spend most time on are stupid errors due to not reading documentation carefully enough!