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Day 11: Crafting Multi-Stage Pipelines in GitLab CI/CD
Streamlining Development: How to Efficiently Organize and Execute Your CI/CD Workflows with GitLab's Multi-Stage Pipelines"
Introduction
As we continue our journey into GitLab's CI/CD capabilities, today, we'll explore how to create and manage multi-stage pipelines. Multi-stage pipelines help streamline the development process by dividing it into organized, sequential stages, ensuring smoother and error-free deployments.
Why Multi-Stage Pipelines?
Multi-stage pipelines let you separate different parts of your CI/CD process. This means if a job fails, it won’t affect the subsequent jobs unless they're dependent on the failed one. It improves clarity, efficiency, and accuracy.
A Basic Multi-Stage Pipeline
In GitLab, the stages of a pipeline are defined in the .gitlab-ci.yml
file. Here's a basic example:
stages:
- build
- test
- deploy
build_job:
stage: build
script:
- echo "Building the project..."
test_job:
stage: test
script:
- echo "Testing the project..."
deploy_job:
stage: deploy
script:
- echo "Deploying to production..."
In this setup, the pipeline will first build the project, then test it, and if all goes well, deploy it.
Adding More Stages and Jobs
Let's add an additional stage for code-review
.
stages:
- build
- test
- code-review
- deploy
# ... [previous jobs]
code_review:
stage: code-review
script:
- echo "Running automated code review tools..."
# Insert code review scripts or tools here.
Sequential and Parallel Jobs
Within a stage, jobs run in parallel by default. If you have multiple jobs under the test
stage, they will run simultaneously, speeding up your pipeline.
stages:
- test
unit_tests:
stage: test
script:
- echo "Running unit tests..."
integration_tests:
stage: test
script:
- echo "Running integration tests..."
Both unit_tests
and integration_tests
will run in parallel since they are part of the same test
stage.
Dependencies Between Jobs
GitLab provides the dependencies
keyword to specify which jobs another job depends on. This is useful if you want a job in a later stage to use artifacts from an earlier stage.
# ... [previous stages and jobs]
deploy_staging:
stage: deploy
script:
- deploy_to_staging.sh
dependencies:
- build_job
- test_job
Conclusion
Mastering multi-stage pipelines in GitLab can revolutionize your CI/CD process, making it more structured and efficient. By clearly segmenting different parts of the development cycle, you can ensure that each phase is completed thoroughly before moving to the next. Tomorrow, we'll dive deeper into parallel and matrix builds in GitLab, which can further optimize and speed up your pipelines.