Introduction to pipelines and builds

Note: Introduced in GitLab 8.8.

Pipelines

A pipeline is a group of builds that get executed in stages. All of the builds in a stage are executed in parallel (if there are enough concurrent runners), and if they all succeed, the pipeline moves on to the next stage. If one of the builds fails, the next stage is not (usually) executed.

Builds

Builds are individual runs of jobs. Not to be confused with a build job or build stage.

Defining pipelines

Pipelines are defined in .gitlab-ci.yml by specifying jobs that run in stages.

See full documentation.

Seeing pipeline status

You can find the current and historical pipeline runs under Pipelines for your project.

Seeing build status

Clicking on a pipeline will show the builds that were run for that pipeline.

Badges

There are build status and test coverage report badges available.

Go to pipeline settings to see available badges and code you can use to embed badges in the README.md or your website.

Build status badge

You can access a build status badge image using following link:

http://example.gitlab.com/namespace/project/badges/branch/build.svg

Test coverage report badge

GitLab makes it possible to define the regular expression for coverage report, that each build log will be matched against. This means that each build in the pipeline can have the test coverage percentage value defined.

You can access test coverage badge using following link:

http://example.gitlab.com/namespace/project/badges/branch/coverage.svg

If you would like to get the coverage report from the specific job, you can add a job=coverage_job_name parameter to the URL. For example, it is possible to use following Markdown code to embed the est coverage report into README.md:

![coverage](http://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/badges/master/coverage.svg?job=coverage)

The latest successful pipeline will be used to read the test coverage value.