GitLab CI/CD (FREE)

GitLab CI/CD is a tool for software development using the continuous methodologies:

NOTE: Out-of-the-box management systems can decrease hours spent on maintaining toolchains by 10% or more. Watch our "Mastering continuous software development" webcast to learn about continuous methods and how GitLab CI/CD can help you simplify and scale software development.

Use GitLab CI/CD to catch bugs and errors early in the development cycle. Ensure that all the code deployed to production complies with the code standards you established for your app.

GitLab CI/CD can automatically build, test, deploy, and monitor your applications by using Auto DevOps.

For a complete overview of these methodologies and GitLab CI/CD, read the Introduction to CI/CD with GitLab.

Video demonstration of continuous integration with GitLab CI/CD: Continuous Integration with GitLab (overview demo).

Concepts

GitLab CI/CD uses a number of concepts to describe and run your build and deploy.

Concept	Description
Pipelines	Structure your CI/CD process through pipelines.
CI/CD variables	Reuse values based on a variable/value key pair.
Environments	Deploy your application to different environments (for example, staging, production).
Job artifacts	Output, use, and reuse job artifacts.
Cache dependencies	Cache your dependencies for a faster execution.
GitLab Runner	Configure your own runners to execute your scripts.
Pipeline efficiency	Configure your pipelines to run quickly and efficiently.
Test cases	Create testing scenarios.

Configuration

GitLab CI/CD supports numerous configuration options:

Configuration	Description
Schedule pipelines	Schedule pipelines to run as often as you need.
Custom path for `.gitlab-ci.yml`	Define a custom path for the CI/CD configuration file.
Git submodules for CI/CD	Configure jobs for using Git submodules.
SSH keys for CI/CD	Using SSH keys in your CI pipelines.
Pipeline triggers	Trigger pipelines through the API.
Merge request pipelines	Design a pipeline structure for running a pipeline in merge requests.
Integrate with Kubernetes clusters	Connect your project to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) or an existing Kubernetes cluster.
Optimize GitLab and GitLab Runner for large repositories	Recommended strategies for handling large repositories.
`.gitlab-ci.yml` full reference	All the attributes you can use with GitLab CI/CD.

Certain operations can only be performed according to the user and job permissions.

Features

GitLab CI/CD features, grouped by DevOps stage, include:

Feature	Description
Configure
Auto DevOps	Set up your app's entire lifecycle.
ChatOps	Trigger CI jobs from chat, with results sent back to the channel.
Connect to cloud services	Connect to cloud providers using OpenID Connect (OIDC) to retrieve temporary credentials to access services or secrets.
Verify
Browser Performance Testing	Quickly determine the browser performance impact of pending code changes.
Load Performance Testing	Quickly determine the server performance impact of pending code changes.
CI services	Link Docker containers with your base image.
GitLab CI/CD for external repositories	Get the benefits of GitLab CI/CD combined with repositories in GitHub and Bitbucket Cloud.
Interactive Web Terminals	Open an interactive web terminal to debug the running jobs.
Review Apps	Configure GitLab CI/CD to preview code changes.
Unit test reports	Identify test failures directly on merge requests.
Using Docker images	Use GitLab and GitLab Runner with Docker to build and test applications.
Release
Auto Deploy	Deploy your application to a production environment in a Kubernetes cluster.
Building Docker images	Maintain Docker-based projects using GitLab CI/CD.
Canary Deployments	Ship features to only a portion of your pods and let a percentage of your user base to visit the temporarily deployed feature.
Deploy boards	Check the current health and status of each CI/CD environment running on Kubernetes.
Feature Flags	Deploy your features behind Feature Flags.
GitLab Pages	Deploy static websites.
GitLab Releases	Add release notes to Git tags.
Cloud deployment	Deploy your application to a main cloud provider.
Secure
Code Quality	Analyze your source code quality.
Container Scanning	Check your Docker containers for known vulnerabilities.
Dependency Scanning	Analyze your dependencies for known vulnerabilities.
License Compliance	Search your project dependencies for their licenses.
Security Test reports	Check for app vulnerabilities.

Examples

See the CI/CD examples page for example project code and tutorials for using GitLab CI/CD with various:

App frameworks
Languages
Platforms

Administration

You can change the default behavior of GitLab CI/CD for:

An entire GitLab instance in the CI/CD administration settings.
Specific projects in the pipelines settings.