Cloud Native CI/CD with GitLab

Key Takeaways

Artifacts are a useful feature in GitLab CI/CD that allows you to pass files between jobs in the same pipeline, between different pipelines, or even between different projects. They help to share data, speed up pipelines, and manage dependencies effectively. To summarize, there are several important aspects to remember about artifacts:

• By default, CI jobs are completely isolated from each other. Each job runs in its own environment, and once the job is complete, its environment is destroyed. This means that files created or modified in one job are not accessible in subsequent jobs unless explicitly passed.

• To share files between jobs, you can use artifacts. Artifacts are files or directories that are generated by a job and can be passed to subsequent jobs in the same pipeline.

• You can define artifacts in a job using the artifacts keyword in your .gitlab-ci.yml file. You can specify which files or directories to include as artifacts using the paths keyword.

• Artifacts can be used to speed up pipelines by passing dependencies or build outputs between jobs, avoiding redundant work.

• You can control which artifacts are passed to a job using the dependencies keyword. This allows you to specify which jobs' artifacts should be made available to the current job.