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

Reading GitLab CI/CD pipeline statuses

Not only does each pipeline instance have a pass/fail status, but each stage within the pipeline instance has a pass/fail status, and each job within any stage has a pass/fail status as well. There are more statuses available than just passed or failed. Here are some of the most commonly seen values:

  • running: The pipeline, stage, or job is in progress.
  • pending: Waiting for resources to become available to start a job.
  • skipped: When an earlier stage fails, all later stages are skipped by default.
  • canceled: Users can cancel any job or pipeline while it’s running.

In Figure 4.3, you saw how the list of pipeline instances shows the status not only of each pipeline instance but also of the stages within each pipeline. In Figure 4.4, you saw how you can zoom in on an individual pipeline instance to see the status of all the jobs within each of the pipeline’s stages. GitLab lets you zoom in even further to see...