Recently I built a headless CMS using Wagtail's API as a backend with NextJS/React/Redux as a frontend. Building the API I ran into some small issues with Image URL data, the API representation of snippets and creating a fully customized page representation. I'll show some simple recipes which will hopefully simplify it for anyone encountering these issues.

Gitlab stores a vast majority of their functionality into their paid packages. Group webhooks is one of them and if your using a group runner, the group webhook becomes sought after. This is easily achievable without using a paid plan by creating reusable templates. Gitlab offers great functionality for configuring your CI with include and exclude functions. These can be reused to create a base template for all your CI jobs.

When creating Django applications or using cookiecutters as Django Cookiecutter you will have by default a number of dependencies that will be needed to be created as a S3 bucket, a Postgres Database and a Mailgun domain.

Writing Gitlab CI templates becomes repetitive when you have similar applications running the same jobs. If a change to a job is needed it will be most likely needed to do the same change in every repository. On top of this there is a vast amount of excess YAML code which is a headache to maintain. Gitlab CI has many built-in templating features that helps bypass these issues and in addition helps automating the process of setting up CI for various applications.