Developing a CI/CD pipeline with GitLab

Abstract

Developing software is a tedious process, especially when repetitive tasks are performed manually. This thesis discusses a better alternative to this approach, which is to automate these processes with a CI/CD pipeline. This thesis aims to enhance the application development process by integrating Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment/Delivery (CD) methods with the application development phase. Additionally, the thesis attempts to determine whether, manual integration or auto integration is better and what kind of projects that can benefit from CI/CD.

For automation purposes, a CI/CD pipeline was implemented with GitLab which runs on a demo web-application that was created for this project. During implementation, technologies such as GitLab, React, NodeJS, Cypress, Jest, ESLint, Fly.io and Docker were used.

The outcome of this thesis is a successfully implemented CI/CD pipeline that auto builds, tests, and deploys the demo application, therefore, improving development process and increasing quality of the product.

These results are also going to be used by the Health Tech Lab TUAS, as reference case for implementing CI/CD in their work environment.