Recently Team Alfonzó, with help from the Build Team, took the next in adopting a new build infrastructure. We wanted to move away from Jenkins and the TOPdesk DockerHub registry, towards a more distributed infrastructure. Our Implementation Wizard project gave us the opportunity we were looking for to start making use of GitLab’s CI and Registry features.
How does GitLab compare to a Jenkins pipeline script?
If you have ever written a pipeline script for Jenkins you will probably find GitLab’s solution more refined and aesthetically more pleasing. Here – instead of Jenkins’ Groovy based DSL – you write a yaml file in which you list the build stages and specify the scripts that should run at each stage. Yaml syntax provides you with a sensible structure, while preserving the freedom you need to configure the build. Unfortunately it lacks the possibility to try out scripts without committing and pushing to the code base. You might want to be aware of this before unwittingly flooding the change history with CI-related experimental changes.