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

Integrating third-party tools into your CI/CD pipelines

In this section, we’re going to cover how to integrate third-party tools into a CI/CD pipeline. The preferred method to integrate a third-party tool into a CI/CD pipeline is to containerize it, create a CI/CD job that uses that container, and then invoke our tool as part of that job. In many cases, this is a requirement and is the first step in setting up an integration.

Tool format expectations

This section is based on the belief that the tool you want to integrate is already compiled and ready to be integrated into your pipeline. In the event it is not, you can add CI jobs before those mentioned here to compile or assemble the tool. Then, you can invoke the CI jobs and steps in this section.

Creating our tool container’s Dockerfile

In the previous chapter, we discussed how to build purpose-built containers. We’re going to use that method here to integrate your tool. If you haven’t read...