GitLab Continuous Integration & Delivery

GitLab has integrated CI/CD pipelines to build, test, deploy, and monitor your code

Rated #1 in the Forrester CI Wave™

“GitLab supports development teams with a well-documented installation and configuration processes, an easy-to-follow UI, and a flexible per-seat pricing model that supports self service. GitLab’s vision is to serve enterprise-scale, integrated software development teams that want to spend more time writing code and less time maintaining their tool chain.” - Forrester CI Wave™

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What Are The Advantages?

Integrated: GitLab CI/CD is part of GitLab. You can use it for free on GitLab.com
Easy to learn: See our Quick Start guide
Beautiful: GitLab CI/CD offers the same great experience as GitLab. Familiar, easy to use, and beautiful.
Scalable: Tests run distributed on separate machines of which you can add as many as you want
Faster results: Each build can be split in multiple jobs that run in parallel on multiple machines
Continuous Delivery (CD): multiple stages, manual deploys, environments, and variables
Open source: CI/CD is included with both the open source GitLab Community Edition and the proprietary GitLab Enterprise Edition

Features

Multi-platform: you can execute builds on Unix, Windows, macOS, and any other platform that supports Go.
Multi-language: build scripts are command line driven and work with Java, PHP, Ruby, C, and any other language.
Stable: your builds run on a different machine than GitLab.
Parallel builds: GitLab CI/CD splits builds over multiple machines, for fast execution.
Realtime logging: a link in the merge request takes you to the current build log that updates dynamically.
Versioned tests: a .gitlab-ci.yml file that contains your tests, allowing everyone to contribute changes and ensuring every branch gets the tests it needs.
Pipeline: you can define multiple jobs per stage and you can trigger other builds.
Autoscaling: you can automatically spin up and down VM's to make sure your builds get processed immediately and minimize costs.
Build artifacts: you can upload binaries and other build artifacts to GitLab and browse and download them.
Test locally there are multiple executors and you can reproduce tests locally.
Docker support: you can use custom Docker images, spin up services as part of testing, build new Docker images, even run on Kubernetes.

Strategy Documentation

Entire DevOps lifecycle

Build your application using GitLab Runners
Run unit and integration tests to check if your code is valid
Look at a live preview of your development branch with Review Apps before merging into stable
Deploy to multiple environments like staging and production, and support advanced features such as canary deployments
Monitor performances and status of your application

Fully integrated with GitLab

Quick project setup: Add projects with a single click, all hooks are set up automatically via the GitLab API.
Merge request integration: See the status of each build within the Merge Request in GitLab.

Architecture

GitLab CI/CD is a part of GitLab, a web application with an API that stores its state in a database. It manages projects/builds and provides a nice user interface, besides all the features of GitLab.

GitLab Runner is an application which processes builds. It can be deployed separately and works with GitLab CI/CD through an API.

In order to run tests, you need at least one GitLab instance and one GitLab Runner.

GitLab Runner

To perform the actual build, you need to install GitLab Runner which is written in Go.

It can run on any platform for which you can build Go binaries, including Linux, macOS, Windows, FreeBSD and Docker.

It can test any programming language including .Net, Java, Python, C, PHP and others.

GitLab Runner has many features, including autoscaling, great Docker support, and the ability to run multiple jobs concurrently.

Install GitLab Runner

Help and More Information

Please see Get help for GitLab if you have questions
View a step-by-step guide to migrate from Jenkins to GitLab
Propose and discuss new features of CI/CD in the GitLab CE issue tracker and tag them with the 'CI/CD' label
More information can be found in the GitLab CI/CD documentation
Since version 8.0, GitLab CE/EE and GitLab CI/CD are a single product
See the presentation on Why CI/CD?