Skip to content

GitLab Pipeline Architecture

Pipeline stages

The GitLab CI pipeline is structured into the following stages:

  1. base

  2. prepare base images and shared artifacts.

  3. linting

  4. code style and static analysis.

  5. build

  6. build Docker images for services.

  7. deploy-images

  8. push images to the container registry.

  9. deploy

  10. deploy services via Helm to Kubernetes.

  11. release

  12. tag and promote releases.

  13. pages

  14. build and publish documentation.

Pipeline philosophy

  • fail fast on quality issues,
  • separate build from deploy,
  • promote artifacts, not source code,
  • keep production deploys explicit and auditable.

Triggering rules

  • merge requests trigger validation pipelines (lint, test, build),
  • pushes to main trigger build and image push,
  • deployment to staging requires a manual trigger after CI passes,
  • deployment to production requires manual approval and quality gates.

This ensures controlled promotion of changes. Production deploys are never triggered automatically.