Mastering GitLab 12

An expert guide to helping you use DevOps techniques with the latest GitLab version to optimize and manage your software workflow

Key Features

• Delve into GitLab's architecture, and install and configure it to fit your environment
• Learn about the underlying principles of Agile software development and DevOps
• Explore Gitlab's features to manage enterprise cloud-native applications and services

Book Description

GitLab is an open source repository management and version control toolkit with functions for enterprises and personal software projects. It offers configurability options, extensions, and APIs that make it an ideal tool for enterprises to manage the software development life cycle.

This book begins by explaining GitLab options and the components of the GitLab architecture. You will learn how to install and set up GitLab on-premises and in the cloud, along with understanding how to migrate code bases from different systems, such as GitHub, Concurrent Versions System, Team Foundation Version Control, and Subversion. Later chapters will help you implement DevOps culture by introducing the workflow management tools in GitLab and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD). In addition to this, the book will guide you through installing GitLab on a range of cloud platforms, monitoring with Prometheus, and deploying an environment with GitLab. You'll also focus on the GitLab CI component to assist you with creating development pipelines and jobs, along with helping you set up GitLab runners for your own project. Finally, you will be able to choose a high availability setup that fits your needs and helps you monitor and act on results obtained after testing.

By the end of this book, you will have gained the expertise you need to use GitLab features effectively, and be able to integrate all phases in the development process.

What you will learn

• Install GitLab on premises and in the cloud using a variety of configurations
• Conduct data migration from the SVN, TFS, CVS, and GitHub platforms to GitLab
• Use GitLab runners to develop different types of configurations in software development
• Plan and perform CI/CD by using GitLab features
• Monitor and secure your software architecture using Prometheus and Grafana
• Implement DevOps culture by introducing workflow management tools in GitLab

Who this book is for

If you are a software developer, DevOps professional, or any developer who wants to master GitLab for productive repository management in your day-to-day tasks, this book is for you. Basic understanding of the software development workflow is assumed.

Table of Contents

1. Introducing the GitLab Architecture
2. Installing GitLab
3. Configuring GitLab Using the Web UI
4. Configuring GitLab from the terminal
5. Importing your project from GitHub to GitLab
6. Migrating from CVS
7. Switching from SVN
8. Moving repositories from TFS
9. GitLab Vision - the Whole Toolchain in One Application
10. Create Your Product, Verify, and Package it
11. The release and configure phase
12. Monitoring with Prometheus
13. Integrating GitLab with CI/CD tools
14. Setting Up Your Project for GitLab Continuous Integration
15. Installing and configuring GitLab runners
16. Using GitLab runners with Docker or Kubernetes
17. Autoscaling GitLab CI Runners
18. Monitoring CI metrics
19. Creating a Basic HA Architecture Using Horizontal Scaling
20. Managing a hybrid HA environment
21. Making your environment Fully Distributed
22. Using Geo to create distributed read-only copies of GitLab

Joost Evertse is an all-round professional with over 20 years of experience in IT in the financial and telecom sectors. He has worked for big and small organizations and has lived in different worlds, including Unix, Oracle, Java, and Windows. Creating order from chaos has been a big focus during his system-engineering years. After 10 years of system administration, he moved into software development and started using CI/CD tools, including GitLab.

At the end of 2016, he started at a significant financial company in the GitLab team, shifting his focus more toward the entire CI/CD pipeline, with the mission of making the CI/CD platform more stable and highly available. His team eventually migrated GitLab to a private cloud and improved release cycles.