GitLab with Git Essentials - Hands-on Lab: Build a .gitlab-ci.yml file

This Hands-On Guide walks you through creating and running a CI/CD pipeline via a .gitlab-ci.yml file.

Estimated time to complete: 30 minutes

Objectives

CI/CD standards for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. In other words, it is a continuous method of software development, where you continuously build, test, deploy, and monitor iterative code changes.

This iterative process helps reduce the chance that you develop new code based on buggy or failed previous versions. GitLab CI/CD can catch bugs early in the development cycle, and help ensure that all the code deployed to production complies with your established code standards.

To use GitLab CI/CD, you start with a .gitlab-ci.yml file at the root of your project which contains the configuration for your CI/CD pipeline. This file follows the YAML format and has its own special syntax. To learn more, see the documentation. It is recommended to bookmark this page for future reference.

Task A. Create a new project and add a CI/CD configuration file

  1. Navigate to your My Test Group, click on the New project button, and click the Create blank project tile.

  2. In the title, type in CI Test.

  3. Set the Visibility Level of the project to Private.

  4. Enable the Initialize repository with a README checkbox.

  5. Leave Enable Static Application Security Testing (SAST) unchecked.

  6. Click the Create project button and wait for GitLab to redirect you to the new project’s main page.

  7. Create a new file by clicking (+) > This directory > New file

  8. In the Filename dialog box enter .gitlab-ci.yml

  9. In the Apply a template dropdown, select General > Bash. This populates your file with the contents of a minimal .gitlab-ci.yml file.

  10. In the editor, delete all lines above the build1: line and below the - echo "For example run a test suite" line. This will leave you with two sections of code, which define the build1 and test1 jobs. Your .gitlab-ci.yml file should look like this:

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    build1:
  stage: build
  script:
    - echo "Do your build here"

test1:
  stage: test
  script:
    - echo "Do a test here"
    - echo "For example run a test suite"

    To learn more about jobs, see the documentation.

  11. Define build and test stages by adding these 3 lines at the top of the file. The stages keyword must be flush left and the stage names must be indented by 2 spaces.

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    stages:
  - build
  - test

    Use stages to define stages that contain groups of jobs. Use stage in a job to configure the job to run in a specific stage. See the documentation to learn more.

  12. Your current .gitlab-ci.yml file should look like this:

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    stages:
  - build
  - test

build1:
  stage: build
  script:
    - echo "Do your build here"

test1:
  stage: test
  script:
    - echo "Do a test here"
    - echo "For example run a test suite"

  13. Leave the default values for the Commit message and Target Branch fields, and click the Commit changes button.

Task B. Inspect the CI/CD pipeline

Pipelines are the top-level component of continuous integration, delivery, and deployment. Pipelines comprise of Jobs, which define what to do, and Stages, which define when to run the jobs. For example, a stage can be defined for all the operations that build a project, and a job of this stage could be to compile the code. To learn more, click here.

  1. GitLab started running a CI/CD pipeline as soon as you committed .gitlab-ci.yml to your project’s repository. To see the project’s pipelines, navigate to Build > Pipelines.

  2. Only 1 pipeline has run so far, so your table of pipelines has only 1 row. See the details of that pipeline by clicking the status label at the left of the pipeline’s row.

    The status label should show either Running or Passed

  3. Inspect the pipeline graph. Each column represents a stage. In the Build stage, there’s a widget representing the build1 job. In the Test column there’s a widget representing the test1 job. Click on the build1 widget to see the job’s output in a web terminal. For example, look for the message Do your build here in the output.

  4. Return to the pipeline graph by clicking on the back button on your web browser. Click on the test1 widget to see the job’s output in a web terminal. For example, look for the message Do a test here in the output.

Lab Guide Complete

You have completed this lab exercise. You can view the other lab guides for this course.

Suggestions?

If you’d like to suggest changes to the lab, please submit them via merge request.

Last modified April 26, 2024: Update Lab Descriptions (05f28a88)
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