GitLab CI/CD Learning Roadmap

Goal: From zero CI/CD experience to production-grade GitLab pipeline design

Learning Phases

Phase 1: GitLab CI Fundamentals (2-3 days)

•.gitlab-ci.yml structure — stages, jobs, script blocks

•Variables and environment injection

•Artifacts vs. cache — what persists between stages vs. between pipeline runs

•Shared vs. specific runners

Phase 2: Pipeline Design Patterns (3-4 days)

•rules: replacing deprecated only:/except:

•needs: — DAG pipelines, removing stage-bottleneck waiting

•include: for shared pipeline templates

•extends: for job template inheritance

•trigger: for child pipelines

Phase 3: Runners and Execution Environments (3-4 days)

•Shell vs. Docker vs. Kubernetes executors — tradeoffs of each

•Runner tags and job routing

•Self-managed runner registration and scaling

Phase 4: Security Scanning and DevSecOps (3-4 days)

•SAST, DAST, dependency scanning, and secret detection via built-in templates

•Reading results in the Merge Request security widget and Security Dashboard

•Configuring pipeline failure on critical vulnerabilities

Phase 5: Advanced Pipeline Engineering (1-2 weeks)

•Dynamic child pipelines, merge trains, review apps

•Matrix jobs and variable scoping

•Multi-project pipelines and Runner fleet autoscaling

•DAG optimization and CI/CD Catalog components

•Self-hosted GitLab HA considerations

Job Roles This Enables

•CI/CD Engineer

•DevOps Engineer

•Platform Engineer

•Release Engineer

Target Certifications

(needs verification — recheck against current source for GitLab's current certification offerings, if any are actively maintained)

How to Use This Roadmap

1.Work through phases in order — Phase 2's needs:-based DAG pipelines assume Phase 1's stage/job model is already solid, and Phase 5's advanced patterns build directly on Phase 2 and Phase 3

2.This technology doesn't have a separate Labs tab — the Fundamentals/Intermediate/Advanced code blocks and a real GitLab.com repo (free shared runners, no installation needed to start) are the hands-on material

3.Build the portfolio projects in projects.md after Phase 3 — a real multi-stage pipeline with a self-managed runner demonstrates far more than shared-runner-only experience

4.Use the Troubleshooting section's real scenarios (stuck-pending jobs, artifacts-vs-cache confusion, needs: stage-ordering issues) as active study material once you've built your first few pipelines

5.Don't treat Phase 4's security scanning as optional — it's one of GitLab's biggest differentiators from Jenkins and is a frequent interview topic for this guide

Prerequisites

See prerequisites.md in this section for what you should know before starting.

Revision Notes

Total time: 3-4 weeks (part-time)
YAML indentation errors are the single most common early-stage source
of confusing pipeline failures — when a pipeline fails in a way that
doesn't match your mental model of the YAML, check indentation first
GitLab.com's free shared runners are sufficient for Phases 1-2; a
self-managed runner (Phase 3) is worth setting up before claiming
production-readiness

GitLab CI/CD — Roadmap