GitLab CI

GitLab itself is an open DevOps platform delivered as a single application. We’ll work with one of GitLab’s features: CI/CD pipelines.

Pipelines

A pipeline is composed of jobs that execute in stages. A pipeline is primarily composed of jobs and stages. GitLab CI groups jobs in stages. All the jobs in a stage are executed in parallel (if there are enough concurrent runners), and if they all succeed, the pipeline moves to the next stage. If one of the jobs fails, the next stage isn’t usually executed.

Jobs

A job is a specific thing we want to do. We might have a job to compile and minify our software and another job to deploy it to the production environment. On a high level, the job defines what must be accomplished.

Stages

If jobs define what needs to be done, stages specify when. Stages determine when the job should run. We may have a deploy stage after test stage. Stages help control job execution.

Runners

Runners run the jobs we have defined.