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.