What Is CI/CD

Part of the GitLab CI course

Picture a team that ships a web app the old way. Someone finishes a feature, runs the tests on their own laptop (or skips them, because it is Friday), copies some files to a server by hand, and hopes nothing else broke. It usually works. Then one week it does not: a test nobody ran catches fire in production, or two people deploy over each other, and the team spends a day untangling what happened.

The umbrella term for that habit is CI/CD, and it is worth slowing down on the letters before you touch any configuration, because people use them loosely and GitLab's docs assume you already know which is which. By the end of this lesson you will know what each half of the acronym actually promises, what you gain by writing the steps down instead of running them by hand, and the handful of words GitLab uses for the...