Day 81: First Pipeline & GitLab Runners

Today was an exciting step forward in my CI/CD journey with GitLab!

🔑 What I did today:

• ✅ Learned about GitLab Runners (shared vs. specific)

• ✅ Configured a runner for my project

• ✅ Wrote my first GitLab CI/CD pipeline (.gitlab-ci.yml)

• ✅ Successfully ran jobs using the runner 🎉

🛠 Key Takeaways

• GitLab Runners are the backbone of CI/CD in GitLab. They pick up jobs defined in the pipeline and execute them.

• There are two main types:

  • Shared Runners: Available for all projects.

  • Specific Runners: Tied to a particular project or group.

• The .gitlab-ci.yml file is where the pipeline magic happens – defining stages like build, test, and deploy.

  Pipeline code:

    stages:
        - build
        - test
  
    build_job:
        stage: build
        script:
          - echo "This is a build stage from  gitlab for building a docker image command is <docker build -t .>"
    test_job:
        stage: test
        script:
          - echo "This is a test stage from gitlab for testing a docker images"
          - mkdir -p logs
          - echo "this is logs from test job" 
       test_deploy_task:
        stage: test
        script:
        - echo "this job is running in parallel"
  

📌 Why this matters

Understanding runners and pipelines is crucial because it’s the foundation of automation in GitLab CI/CD. From here, I’ll move toward building more advanced pipelines with testing, artifact handling, and deployment.

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🔥 Up next: Setting up advanced stages in my GitLab pipelines!