Preface

Before diving in to the basics, this post would like to implore the reader to look up definitions of all the technical jargon that will naturally follow in the series. You cannot build a technical understanding of the structures involved unless you’re proficient in the language it speaks.

Note: All technical jargon will be marked with an asterisk (*), making it easier to identify them for lookups.

This is the first in a 5-part series that aims to act as a manual to developers who are either starting out learning GitLab CI/CD or more senior devs looking for a handbook.

First order of business — What are CI/CD pipelines, and why GitLab?

In order to comprehend the concept that is automation and pipelines, we need to trace the history of why these things came into place, the technologies that came after and how refined they became over time.

To give a brief introduction, before pipelines, developers had to manually set up everything — from installing dependencies required by apps to setting up…