Automate GitLab CI/CD Pipelines

This skill creates efficient GitLab CI pipelines with proper stage organization, caching, and deployment strategies. Its basic pipeline structure runs build, test, and deploy stages - building a Node app with npm ci/npm run build, caching node_modules by CI_COMMIT_REF_SLUG, testing with lint/coverage reporting in Cobertura format, and deploying to Kubernetes with kubectl apply and kubectl rollout status restricted to main. It covers Docker build-and-push using docker:24-dind, tagging by commit SHA and latest; multi-environment deployment via a YAML anchor template shared between a deploy:staging job (auto, on develop) and a deploy:production job (when: manual, on main); a Terraform pipeline with validate/plan/apply stages, terraform fmt -check, a saved tfplan artifact, and a manual terraform apply -auto-approve; security scanning via GitLab's SAST, Dependency-Scanning, and Container-Scanning templates plus a Trivy image scan failing on HIGH/CRITICAL severities; four caching strategies (per-job cache, global cache, pull-push policy, separate caches per job); and dynamic child pipelines where a generate-pipeline job writes a child-pipeline.yml artifact that a trigger-child job includes with strategy: depend.

Use it to automate GitLab-based CI/CD, implement multi-stage pipelines, configure GitLab Runners, deploy to Kubernetes from GitLab, or implement GitOps workflows. It does not apply outside GitLab CI pipeline patterns - a different domain or tool is out of scope. It relates to separate github-actions-templates, deployment-pipeline-design, and secrets-management skills.

Inputs: the application's build, test, and deployment requirements and target GitLab Runners. Outputs: a .gitlab-ci.yml pipeline with defined stages, Docker image build and registry push steps, Kubernetes deployment jobs per environment with manual gates for production, a Terraform validate/plan/apply pipeline, SAST/dependency/container security scan results, cached dependency directories, and dynamically generated child pipelines.

GitLab CI/CD (stages, cache, artifacts, environment, YAML anchors, include, trigger), Docker and docker:24-dind, kubectl for Kubernetes deploys, HashiCorp Terraform, GitLab's Security/SAST, Dependency-Scanning, and Container-Scanning templates, and Trivy for image scanning.

build-docker:
  stage: build
  image: docker:24
  services:
    - docker:24-dind
  before_script:
    - docker login -u $CI_REGISTRY_USER -p $CI_REGISTRY_PASSWORD $CI_REGISTRY
  script:
    - docker build -t $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:$CI_COMMIT_SHA .
    - docker build -t $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:latest .
    - docker push $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:$CI_COMMIT_SHA
    - docker push $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:latest
  only:
    - main
    - tags

Platform and DevOps engineers building GitLab CI/CD pipelines who need proper stage organization, caching, Kubernetes/Terraform deployment, and security scanning rather than a single monolithic job. Its best practices: use specific image tags instead of latest (node:20, not node:latest), cache dependencies appropriately, use artifacts for build outputs, implement manual gates for production, use environments for deployment tracking, enable merge request pipelines, use pipeline schedules for recurring jobs, implement security scanning, use CI/CD variables for secrets, and monitor pipeline performance.