Auto DevOps development guidelines

This document provides a development guide for contributors to Auto DevOps.

An Auto DevOps technical walk-through is also available on YouTube.

Development

Auto DevOps builds on top of GitLab CI/CD to create an automatic pipeline based on your project contents. When Auto DevOps is enabled for a project, the user does not need to explicitly include any pipeline configuration through a .gitlab-ci.yml file.

In the absence of a .gitlab-ci.yml file, the Auto DevOps CI/CD template is used implicitly to configure the pipeline for the project. This template is a top-level template that includes other sub-templates, which then defines jobs.

Some jobs use images that are built from external projects:

• Auto Build uses configuration in which the build job uses an image that is built using the auto-build-image project.
• Auto Deploy uses configuration in which the jobs defined in this template use an image that is built using the auto-deploy-image project. By default, the Helm chart defined in auto-deploy-app is used to deploy.

There are extra variables that get passed to the CI jobs when Auto DevOps is enabled that are not present in a typical CI job. These can be found in ProjectAutoDevops.

Development environment

See the Simple way to develop/test Kubernetes workflows with a local cluster issue for discussion around setting up Auto DevOps development environments.

Monitoring on GitLab.com

The metric auto_devops_completed_pipelines_total (only available to GitLab team members) counts completed Auto DevOps pipelines, labeled by status.