GitLab's Inception: Tracing the Start of a Powerful Tool - part 1

GitLab is an all-in-one DevOps platform that lets you manage your repositories, CI/CD pipelines, secrets, runners, and deployments—everything under one roof.

📌 What You'll Learn

• What is GitLab?

• How is GitLab different from GitHub/Bitbucket?

• How to use GitLab?

• Creating and managing projects & groups

• Building pipelines with .gitlab-ci.yml

• Secrets, Variables, and Artifacts

• Self-hosted vs SaaS Runners

• Deploying projects via GitLab CI/CD

🔰 What is GitLab?

GitLab is a web-based Git repository manager with features for issue tracking, CI/CD, and more. It allows you to plan, build, test, and deploy in one unified platform—perfect for DevOps workflows.

🔄 GitLab vs GitHub vs Bitbucket

🛠️ Getting Started with GitLab

1. Create EC2 instance and set up your local machine.

2.Learn how Groups and Projects (Repos) are structured.

URL: gitlab.com/group_name/project_name

Example: gitlab.com/harsh/node-tod-cicd

3.Connect to EC2 using an SSH key.

4.Understand how to import GitHub repos into GitLab using the project URL.

🔁 GitLab CI/CD Basics

To set up CI/CD, create a file named .gitlab-ci.yml in the root of your repo.

This YAML file defines:

• Pipeline ➝ List of stages

• Stages ➝ Sequence of execution (e.g., build, test)

• Jobs ➝ Tasks executed inside stages

Sample Pipeline Flow

stages:
  - build
  - test
  - push
  - deploy

build-job:
  stage: build
  script:
    - echo "Building..."

test-job:
  stage: test
  script:
    - echo "Running tests..."

push-job:
  stage: push
  script:
    - echo "Pushing code..."

deploy-job:
  stage: deploy
  script:
    - echo "Deploying..."

🏃 Runners in GitLab

Runners are the agents that execute your CI/CD jobs.

• GitLab provides shared runners by default.

• You can also self-host your own runners.

you can copy and paste this script given at top right corner inside your server with after

sudo su 
// gives you super user access
//after this cmd copy that scrpit provided by how to install gitlab runners? inside Register runners

🔐 Variables & Secrets

• GitLab supports both inbuilt and user-defined variables.

• Secrets can be masked and encrypted for safe usage.

• Use these variables in your .gitlab-ci.yml for dynamic configurations.

📦 Artifacts

Artifacts are the outputs of your CI/CD jobs.

Examples:

• Logs

• Reports

• Compiled binaries

They can be shared between jobs and stages for better traceability.

🔖 Branching Strategy & Tagging

you can follow a simple branching model:

main → dev → prod → feature

You can also create tags during pipeline runs to mark versions based on releases or environments.