With this post, I’d like to start a series of CI-related tips, targeted mostly at GitLab, since that’s my go-to tool for things CI/CD-related. I’m sure most of them could be easily applied to other CI systems, though. While GitLab does a great job at many things (repository hosting and related stuff, like MRs, pipelines, issue boards, etc.), it sometimes lacks more specialized features in some areas. With heavy usage of pipelines in my projects, I often had to look for workarounds and smart tricks.

In the previous post I showed how to keep all the scripts used in the CI in one repository. Let’s see what more advanced scripts you could put in there. This time I’d like to show how to add automatic versioning to your pipeline. You will also see how to push commits to your repository within the CI jobs. But first, let’s start with some background. Picking your flow One of the things I love about GitLab is its flexibility for setting up your own CI workflow.