GitLab CI/CD Pipelines

Erwin Schleier
3 min readOct 25, 2023

GitLab CI/CD, which stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, is about automating the software delivery process. By automating steps like building, testing and deploying, it is ensured that developers can release software more rapidly and with higher quality.

Continuous Integration

The Continuous Integration concept resolves around the practice of integrating code changes frequently, sometimes even several times a day. This means that as developers submit their changes, these will be automatically tested to ensure they meet quality standards and are compatible with the existing codebase.

Continuous Deployment

The Continuous Deployment or Delivery part deals with getting the integrated and tested code out to the user. Once the code passes all its tests, it can be automatically deployed to production, stating, or any other predefined environment.

Create a Simple Pipeline

All these processes or jobs are defined in a file called .gitlab-ci.yml, which is stored within the code repository. To run the these jobs, a so called Runner is required. These are essentially agents that pick up the job and execute them. These runners can be hosted on various platforms, supporting configurations ranging from Docker to Kubernetes.

build-job:
script:
- echo "Hello World!"

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