gitlab-org--gitlab-foss/doc/ci/README.md

comments	description
false	Learn how to use GitLab CI/CD, the GitLab built-in Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, and Continuous Delivery toolset to build, test, and deploy your application.

GitLab Continuous Integration (GitLab CI/CD)

GitLab CI/CD is GitLab's built-in tool for software development using continuous methodology:

• Continuous integration (CI).
• Continuous delivery and deployment (CD).

Within the DevOps lifecycle, GitLab CI/CD spans the Verify (CI) and Release (CD) stages.

Overview

CI/CD is a vast area, so GitLab provides documentation for all levels of expertise. Consult the following table to find the right documentation for you:

Level of expertise	Resource
New to the concepts of CI and CD	For a high-level overview, read an introduction to CI/CD with GitLab.
Familiar with GitLab CI/CD concepts	After getting familiar with GitLab CI/CD, let us walk you through a simple example in our getting started guide.
A GitLab CI/CD expert	Jump straight to our .gitlab.yml reference.

Familiarity with GitLab Runner is also useful because it is responsible for running the jobs in your CI/CD pipeline. On GitLab.com, shared Runners are enabled by default so you won't need to set this up to get started.

CI/CD with Auto DevOps

Auto DevOps is the default minimum-configuration method for implementing CI/CD. Auto DevOps:

• Provides simplified setup and execution of CI/CD.
• Allows GitLab to automatically detect, build, test, deploy, and monitor your applications.

Manually configured CI/CD

For complete control, you can manually configure GitLab CI/CD.

Usage

With basic knowledge of how GitLab CI/CD works, the following documentation extends your knowledge into more features:

Topic	Description
Creating and using CI/CD pipelines	Understand, visualize, create, and use CI/CD pipelines.
CI/CD Variables	How environment variables can be configured and made available in pipelines.
Where variables can be used	A deeper look into where and how CI/CD variables can be used.
User and job permissions	Learn about the access levels a user can have for performing certain CI actions.
Configuring GitLab Runners	Documentation for configuring GitLab Runner.
Introduction to environments and deployments	Learn how to separate your jobs into environments and use them for different purposes like testing, building and, deploying.
Job artifacts	Learn about the output of jobs.
Cache dependencies in GitLab CI/CD	Discover how to speed up pipelines using caching.
Using Git submodules with GitLab CI	How to run your CI jobs when using Git submodules.
Pipelines for merge requests	Create pipelines specifically for merge requests.
Using SSH keys with GitLab CI/CD	Use SSH keys in your build environment.
Triggering pipelines through the API	Use the GitLab API to trigger a pipeline.
Pipeline schedules	Trigger pipelines on a schedule.
Connecting GitLab with a Kubernetes cluster	Integrate one or more Kubernetes clusters to your project.
ChatOps	Trigger CI jobs from chat, with results sent back to the channel.
Interactive web terminals	Open an interactive web terminal to debug the running jobs.
Review Apps	Configure GitLab CI/CD to preview code changes in a per-branch basis.
Deploy Boards [PREMIUM]	Check the current health and status of each CI/CD environment running on Kubernetes.
GitLab CI/CD for external repositories [PREMIUM]	Get the benefits of GitLab CI/CD combined with repositories in GitHub and BitBucket Cloud.
Protected environments [PREMIUM]	Ensure that only people with the right privileges can deploy to an environment.

GitLab Pages

GitLab CI/CD can be used to build and host static websites. For more information, see the documentation on GitLab Pages, or dive right into the CI/CD step-by-step guide for Pages.

Examples

GitLab provides examples of configuring GitLab CI/CD in the form of:

• A collection of examples and other resources.
• Example projects that are available at the gitlab-examples group. For example, see:
  • multi-project-pipelines for examples of implementing multi-project pipelines.
  • review-apps-nginx provides an example of using Review Apps.

Administration

As a GitLab administrator, you can change the default behavior of GitLab CI/CD for:

• An entire GitLab instance.
• Specific projects, using pipelines settings.

See also:

• How to enable or disable GitLab CI/CD.
• Other CI administration settings.

Using Docker

Docker is commonly used with GitLab CI/CD. Learn more about how to to accomplish this with the following documentation:

Topic	Description
Using Docker images	Use GitLab and GitLab Runner with Docker to build and test applications.
Building Docker images with GitLab CI/CD	Maintain Docker-based projects using GitLab CI/CD.

Related topics include:

• Docker integration.
• CI services (linked Docker containers).

Why GitLab CI/CD?

The following articles explain reasons to use GitLab CI/CD for your CI/CD infrastructure:

• Why we chose GitLab CI for our CI/CD solution
• Building our web-app on GitLab CI

See also the Why CI/CD? presentation.

Breaking changes

As GitLab CI/CD has evolved, certain breaking changes have been necessary. These are:

• CI variables renaming for GitLab 9.0. Read about the deprecated CI variables and what you should use for GitLab 9.0+.
• New CI job permissions model. See what changed in GitLab 8.12 and how that affects your jobs. There's a new way to access your Git submodules and LFS objects in jobs.