Wikipedia says: “GitLab is a web-based DevOps lifecycle tool that provides a Git-repository manager providing wiki, issue-tracking and CI/CD pipeline features, using an open-source license, developed by GitLab Inc.” In software engineering, CI/CD or CICD refers to the combined practices of continuous integration and either continuous delivery or continuous deployment.

In order to understand the above definition, we should understand Git and GitHub.

GitLab is a place where you can store your repositories. It is a remote host that uses Git version control similar to GitHub. It does more than GitHub. You have boards that have features to organize your code. It has milestones, labels, and teams of people. It has file browsers, files, commits, graphs, charts and pull requests. You can manage Docker containers. You can do continuous deployment and continuous delivery.

What is CI/CD? CI/CD or CICD generally refers to the combined practices of continuous integration and either continuous delivery or continuous deployment.

YouTube Video

I like watching videos, especially if I am a beginner at a topic or program. Here is a GitLab video on YouTube called GitLab Beginner Tutorial 1 | Introduction and Getting Started. It is the first in a series of videos. There are seven videos. In the first video at time 4:00 minutes Raghav Pal shows us how to sign up for a GitLab account.