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

Installing and Configuring GitLab Runners

In Chapter 4, you learned about the fundamentals of GitLab CI/CD. We defined and introduced the vocabulary and concepts around CI/CD pipelines, which included CI/CD pipeline components, different pipeline types, how to observe and interact with pipelines in the GitLab UI, and how to write a pipeline’s configuration using the .gitlab-ci.yml file. A few paragraphs were also spent introducing GitLab Runner as the crucial component of GitLab CI/CD, which actually runs pipeline tasks and reports the results back to GitLab.

The sole focus of this chapter will be the topic of GitLab runners. You will learn in this chapter that GitLab runners act as the “muscle” in the CI/CD process. Runners are small programs that are installed separately from the main GitLab application. Their purpose is to receive new CI/CD jobs published by GitLab and follow the jobs’ instructions as specified in the .gitlab-ci.yml file. Runners can...