Getting Started With GitLab

what is GitLab?

• Gitlab is basically a web-based DEVOPS lifecycle tool

• In layman Terms it is an advanced version of Github

Features

• CI/CD pipeline features

• monitoring and security tool

• Collaboration of code and project management

BUILDING -> TESTING -> DEPLOYEMENT

GITLAB SETUP

-> open gitlab.com

-> login using google or github

-> create a new file in the format -> .gitlab-ci.yml

-> and write a sample code as below

build:
    script:
        - echo "first step"
        - echo "Second step"

-Now commit the changes made as you do in github

-And see the magic the pipeline will process and we can similarly create multiple jobs and see each process will only take place after the previous one has completed

-So its very easy to automatically automate the process of building testing and deployement so there will be no downtime in any website when the changes are made and the users will not be affected

• We can also create multiple jobs but we see that all the jobs will run at the same time parallely

• The below code depicts that process

#build step
build-job:
  script:
    - echo "Building Phase"

test-job:
  script:
    - echo "testing Phase"

deploy-job:
  script:
    - echo "deploying Phase"

• Now if we want to make them run one after other use the below code

•   #build step
    stages:
      - build
      - test
      - deploy
  
    build-job:
      stage: build
      script:
        - echo "Building Phase"
  
    test-job:
      stage: test
      script:
        - echo "testing Phase"
  
    deploy-job:
      stage: deploy
      script:
        - echo "deploying Phase"
  

-Now see it happens one after other

Running bash scripts using GitLab

#!/bin/bash
echo "hello world"
echo "end of script"

Now make changes in gitlab-ci.yml file

bash_execute:
  script:
    - bash ./basic.sh

• Thats it so simple and easy

Email Notifications :

We can notified in mail if there is any pipeline error during our commit to make us be aware of the recent changes and updates or errors

And notifies us if the error in the pipeline is fixed or not

Croning jobs using gitlab

We can even use cron jobs to schedule our task

• At what Time, month, hour or at what minute that task needs to be done

• very helpful because 24/7 we wont be sitting at the system monitoring use we use cron jobs to automate the process

What is CI/CD PIPELINES?

CI/CD → continuous development and continuous integration

Imagine you're working with a team on a web application project. Every time a team member pushes code changes to Git, GitLab's CI/CD pipeline triggers:

1. The build step compiles the code.

2. The test step runs unit tests, integration tests, and possibly code quality checks.

3. If everything passes, the deploy step deploys the code to a staging environment. In some cases, it may even automatically deploy to production.