GitLab Pipelines Simple Walkthrough [5min Read]

GitLab pipelines are a powerful way to automate your projects development and deployment. With GitLab pipelines, you can define a series of jobs and rules for how they should be run, allowing you to build, test, and deploy your code with ease.

How GitLab pipelines work

GitLab pipelines can be triggered in a variety of ways, depending on your needs.

One common way is to set up a pipeline to run automatically whenever new code is pushed to the repository. This can be a convenient way to ensure that your code is tested and deployed as soon as possible.

You can also set up pipelines to run on a schedule, such as once a day or once a week. This can be useful for tasks such as automated testing or deployment to staging environments.

In addition to running pipelines automatically, you can also manually trigger pipelines from within GitLab. This can be useful for one-off tasks, such as running a pipeline on demand or rerunning a pipeline that has failed. You can also use the GitLab API to trigger pipelines from external tools or scripts, giving you even more control over the process.

GitLab pipelines are configured using a file called .gitlab-ci.yml, which is stored in the root of your repository. This file specifies the jobs that make up your pipeline, as well as any rules or dependencies between them. You can use variables and templates in your .gitlab-ci.yml file to make your pipeline more flexible and reusable.

Runners

One important aspect of GitLab pipelines is the use of runners.

Runners are the components of GitLab that actually execute the jobs defined in your pipeline. You can use runners provided by GitLab, or you can set up your own runners on servers or other infrastructure that you control.

This can be useful if you have specialized requirements, such as the need to run jobs on specific operating systems or in specific environments.

Features of GitLab pipelines

GitLab offers a number of tools and features to assist you in managing and monitoring your pipelines.

You can see the status and logs of your jobs in real time, as well as how long each job took to complete and how much resources it consumed. You can even configure alerts and notifications to notify you when a pipeline fails or a job takes longer than expected.

One of the most useful features of GitLab pipelines: the ability to run jobs in parallel. This can significantly speed up the development process, as you can run multiple jobs at the same time, rather than having to wait for one job to finish before starting the next. You can also use parallelism to run different jobs on different environments, such as staging and production, which can be useful for testing and deployment.

Important to Note

When using GitLab pipelines, keep in mind that they are only as reliable as the code and configuration you put into them. It is critical that your pipeline is well-defined and tested so that you can be confident that it will function as expected. This may require some trial and error, but the time you spend setting up your pipeline will pay off in the long run because you will be able to automate many of your development and deployment tasks.

Conclusion

GitLab pipelines are a powerful tool for automating your projects’ development and deployment processes. GitLab pipelines can help you streamline your workflow and improve the reliability of your code whether you’re working on a small project with a few jobs or a large project with many dependencies. They can help you build, test, and deploy your code faster and more efficiently thanks to their integration with GitLab, flexibility, and parallelism.