GitLab CI/CD Pipeline

Table of Contents

• Overview
• When to Use
• Quick Start
• Reference Guides
• Best Practices

Overview

Create comprehensive GitLab CI/CD pipelines that automate building, testing, and deployment using GitLab Runner infrastructure and container execution.

When to Use

• GitLab repository CI/CD setup
• Multi-stage build pipelines
• Docker registry integration
• Kubernetes deployment
• Review app deployment
• Cache optimization
• Dependency management

Quick Start

Minimal working example:

# .gitlab-ci.yml
image: node:18-alpine

variables:
  DOCKER_DRIVER: overlay2
  FF_USE_FASTZIP: "true"

stages:
  - lint
  - test
  - build
  - security
  - deploy-review
  - deploy-prod

cache:
  key: ${CI_COMMIT_REF_SLUG}
  paths:
    - node_modules/
    - .npm/

lint:
  stage: lint
  script:
    - npm install
// ... (see reference guides for full implementation)

Reference Guides

Detailed implementations in the references/ directory:

Guide	Contents
Complete Pipeline Configuration	Complete Pipeline Configuration
GitLab Runner Configuration	GitLab Runner Configuration
Docker Layer Caching Optimization	Docker Layer Caching Optimization
Multi-Project Pipeline	Multi-Project Pipeline
Kubernetes Deployment	Kubernetes Deployment, Performance Testing Stage, Release Pipeline with Semantic Versioning

Best Practices

✅ DO

• Use stages to organize pipeline flow
• Implement caching for dependencies
• Use artifacts for test reports
• Set appropriate cache keys
• Implement conditional execution with only and except
• Use needs: for job dependencies
• Clean up artifacts with expire_in
• Use Docker for consistent environments
• Implement security scanning stages
• Set resource limits for jobs
• Use merge request pipelines

❌ DON'T

• Run tests serially when parallelizable
• Cache everything unnecessarily
• Leave large artifacts indefinitely
• Store secrets in configuration files
• Run privileged Docker without necessity
• Skip security scanning
• Ignore pipeline failures
• Use only: [main] without proper controls