Getting started with GitLab-CE. Part 1: Installation
CI/CD Platform Overview
When you want or need to use CI/CD you have a lot of CI/CD platforms where you can choose from. As with most “tools”, the tool is less important. What (which flow, best practices, security benchmarks, etc) and how you implement it, is what matters.
One of the most commonly used options is Jenkins.
I used and still use Jenkins and created a jenkins build workstation to build software and test in my homelab a couple of years back.
Jenkins started as Hudson at Sun Microsystem(RIP). Hudson is one of the many open-source projects that were started at Sun and killed by Oracle. Jenkins continued as the open-source fork of Hudson.
Jenkins has evolved. If you need to do more complex things you probably end up creating a lot of groovy scripts, nothing wrong with groovy. But as with a lot of discussions about programming, the ecosystem (who is using it, which libraries are available, etc) is important.
Groovy isn’t that commonly used in and known in the system administration ecosystem so this is probably something you need to learn if you’re coming for the system administrator world ( as I do, so I learnt the basics of Groovy this way ).
The other option is to implement CI/CD using the commonly used source hosting platforms; GitHub and GitLab.
- On GitHub we have GitHub Actions.
- On GitLab there is GitLab CI/CD.
