I have plenty of experience when it comes to deploying web-based applications using GitLab environments. I’m at a new job now where we are testing a suite of binaries and want to deploy these binaries to some servers we have setup for the explicit case of testing a deployment.

The binaries are servers but not web-based servers. The application as a whole is NOT a web application in the slightest. The binaries serve as the backend server for a desktop GUI application.

We would like to utilise GitLab environments to push our deployments into a testing/staging area but it seems that GitLabs environments are designed with web applications in mind as in their documentation they constantly speak about deploying and making an application available at a certain URL (static and dynamic deployments).

We have an installer that can install the application but no way currently to deploy the installer into some environment that will stay up until we shut it down after running our tests.

What exactly are my options here?