GitLab CI/CD

GitLab CI/CD is the continuous integration and continuous delivery system built into GitLab itself. You describe your build, test, and deploy process as YAML in a single file, .gitlab-ci.yml, committed at the root of your repository. Push a commit, and GitLab reads that file, schedules the work it describes, and reports the result back on the commit and the merge request. There is no separate CI server to install: GitLab hosts the scheduling and the interface, and either GitLab or your own infrastructure supplies the machines that actually run the work.

The mental model

A pipeline is the top-level run: everything triggered for one commit, merge request, schedule, or manual click. A pipeline is composed of stages, which run in order, and jobs, which live inside a stage. Jobs in the same stage run in parallel; if any job in a stage fails, later stages are normally skipped and the pipeline stops early. A small pipeline might look like: a build stage with a compile job, a test stage with test1 and test2 jobs that only start once compile succeeds, and a deploy stage with a deploy-to-production job that only starts once both test jobs succeed.

build-job:
  stage: build
  script:
    - echo "Building..."

test-job1:
  stage: test
  script:
    - echo "Testing part 1"

GitLab CI/CD

The mental model

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