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

Defining the terms pipeline, CI, and CD

Since much of the power of GitLab comes from configuring CI/CD pipelines to do various things to and with your code, it’s critical to understand what a pipeline even is. So, an obvious place to start a discussion of this topic is to figure out exactly what we mean by pipeline, CI, and CD. We won’t start creating pipelines yet—that will come in a later chapter.

Understanding what a pipeline is

A GitLab CI/CD pipeline is a series of steps that are performed on your files whenever you commit edits to the GitLab-hosted copy of a repository. A lot is going on in that sentence, so let’s take a more careful look at each part of it.

What do we mean by “a series of steps”? You can think of these steps as tasks that are performed on your files. For example, you may want to run various tests or scanners on your files to make sure your code is well-written, is free from security vulnerabilities, uses appropriately...