Environments and Deployments

Part of the GitLab CI course

Your deploy job works. It runs scp or kubectl apply or an Ansible playbook, it goes green, and the new version is live. Then someone asks a question you cannot answer from the pipeline page: what is actually running on staging right now? Who put it there? Was it before or after Tuesday's change?

A pipeline records that a job ran. It does not record what state that job left the world in. GitLab's environment: keyword closes that gap: it turns a successful job into a deployment, a tracked record that a specific commit is now live in a specific place. ...