Book Image

Automating DevOps with GitLab CI/CD Pipelines

By : Christopher Cowell, Nicholas Lotz, Chris Timberlake
Book Image

Automating DevOps with GitLab CI/CD Pipelines

By: Christopher Cowell, Nicholas Lotz, Chris Timberlake

Overview of this book

Developers and release engineers understand the high stakes involved in building, packaging, and deploying code correctly. Ensuring that your code is functionally correct, fast, and secure is a time-consuming and complex task. Code implementation, development, and deployment can be conducted efficiently using GitLab CI/CD pipelines. Automating DevOps with GitLab CI/CD Pipelines begins with the basics of Git and GitLab, showing how to commit and review code. You’ll learn to set up GitLab Runners for executing and autoscaling CI/CD pipelines and creating and configuring pipelines for many software development lifecycle steps. You'll also discover where to find pipeline results in GitLab, and how to interpret those results. Through the course of the book, you’ll become well-equipped with deploying code to different environments, advancing CI/CD pipeline features such as connecting GitLab to a Kubernetes cluster and using GitLab with Terraform, triggering pipelines and improving pipeline performance and using best practices and troubleshooting tips for uncooperative pipelines. In-text examples, use cases, and self-assessments will reinforce the important CI/CD, GitLab, and Git concepts, and help you prepare for interviews and certification exams related to GitLab. By the end of this book, you'll be able to use GitLab to build CI/CD pipelines that automate all the DevOps steps needed to build and deploy high-quality, secure code.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1 Getting Started with DevOps, Git, and GitLab
6
Part 2 Automating DevOps Stages with GitLab CI/CD Pipelines
11
Part 3 Next Steps for Improving Your Applications with GitLab

Storing code in GitLab’s container and package registries for later deployment

GitLab’s package and container registries are useful not only for making software available for users to download but also for storing packages and libraries for use in CI/CD pipelines, or for deployment to an environment. In this section, we will discuss how to programmatically interact with the registries via CI/CD jobs.

Using images from the container registry

In the previous section, we built a containerized version of our app and pushed the image to GitLab’s container registry. Recall that the CI/CD jobs we used to build the container image themselves run in containers, hence the reference to terms such as docker:stable and docker:dnd. In this example, we are pulling from a public container registry, that is, Docker Hub.

However, we can also pull container images we have pushed to GitLab’s container registry and use them as the basis for running our CI/CD jobs. We...