Build, Test, Rinse, and Repeat

Now that we’ve explored how to maintain your source files both within and remotely from GitLab, let’s look at another of GitLab’s useful features: building products using continuous integration. In this chapter, we are going to cover the basic mechanisms of doing this. First, we will be introduced to GitLab’s configuration file that defines what we wish to build and how to test it. We’ll then look at how to use Docker images to simplify having to install the tools we need to build stuff. From there, we’ll introduce the topic of CI/CD variables that we can use to build the same product for different environments such as development or production. Finally, we’ll look at ways to split up the configuration file into smaller, more manageable pieces.