From Zero to Continuous Delivery with GitLab CI Pipelines

This interactive workshop is designed to equip you with the skills to set up and automate a GitLab CI pipeline from scratch. Suitable for both beginners and those with some experience, this session will focus on implementing continuous deployment for applications combining backend technologies (Java or Python) and frontend frameworks (React or Angular with TypeScript). Key topics include branch management, job dependencies, artifact handling, parallel execution, and environment variables. You will also learn to enforce best practices in software development such as static code analysis, secret scanning, and automated version control. By the end of the workshop, you will have a functional, fully automated CI/CD pipeline in your repository, with a clear understanding of how to extend and optimize it. Whether you are a beginner or have some experience, we will set up GitLab CI from scratch in a repository without CI step by step using an example. Depending on the previous knowledge of the participants, this can be an application with a backend in Java or Python and a frontend using React or Angular with TypeScript. The knowledge conveyed in this workshop can be applied to any technology, though. The focus is on showing best practices so that every person can understand every part of it and leave no questions unanswered. Apart from basic concepts like branch management, stages, jobs and dependencies between jobs, artifacts, parallelization, and environment variables, the following aspects will be automated:

• Build, test and deployment
• Enforcing good development practices (for example static code analysis, code formatting, secret scanning, style guides and commit guidelines)
• Release process including automated  version bumps using semantic versioning and changelog generation
• Update of dependencies

Ideally, the workshop will be interactive, where the focus will be tailored to the needs and interests of the participants.