Variables and Secrets

Part of the GitLab CI course

A pipeline that behaves exactly the same no matter who pushed it, or which branch they pushed to, cannot tell staging from production, and it cannot tell a real deploy key from a placeholder. Every serious pipeline needs to know things at the moment it runs: which commit it is building, which branch triggered it, and how to authenticate to a database or a cloud API without printing that password somewhere a...

Picture a printed form with a blank line on it: "Environment: ______". The form itself, .gitlab-ci.yml, is identical for everyone who runs the pipeline, but the value written into that blank changes depending on the situation. In GitLab CI, a variable is exactly that kind of labeled slot: a name that holds a piece of text, which any job's script: lines can read back later by putting a dollar sign in front of the...