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

Setting up your environment

Before you start writing any code, you need to organize a few preliminary things. Specifically, you need to make a GitLab project for storing your code and running your pipelines, you need to make some GitLab issues to help plan and track your work, and you need to clone the project’s repository to your local computer so that you can write code using your favorite IDE instead of entirely within the GitLab GUI.

Making a GitLab project

Let’s rewind to the beginning of our journey with the Hats for Cats web app. We know we want to make a web app for our online feline accessories store, so let’s start by making a GitLab project to hold not only our web app’s code but also the additional GitLab components that we’ll be using as we build the app.

A note about the GUI

Throughout this chapter, we’ll continue our practice of showing you code snippets but generally not showing the steps for using the GitLab GUI...