Three Ways to Generate GitLab CI Pipelines

GitLab CI/CD pipelines are a powerful tool for automating the building, testing, and deployment of code changes. They allow you to define a series of jobs that are automatically run whenever code is pushed to a repository. But generating that initial pipeline can be hard. Let me show you three ways to make this process smoother.

The scenario

Let’s assume you have a React application that uses Node.js and npm. You want to create a GitLab CI pipeline to help build and test your app. First, you need to put all your project files in a GitLab repository and start writing the pipeline definition in a .gitlab-ci.yml file.

Next, I will show you three ways to generate this pipeline:

• Using GitLab Templates
• Using the CI/CD catalog of a 3rd party tool called R2Devops.
• Using artificial intelligence using the ChatGPT tool.

Let’s begin!

GitLab Templates

One easy way to generate a GitLab CI pipeline is to use one of the existing GitLab templates.

To access the templates, go to your project in GitLab and open the Web IDE.

From here, you can create a new file named .gitlab-ci.yml. The name has to be exactly this one. Otherwise, GitLab will not find the pipeline.

From the suggestions provided, select .gitlab-ci.yml.

Now all you’ve got is an empty file. Click on Choose a template to open the list of available templates.