Exploring GitLab CI pipeline support

Now that we’ve seen how GitHub Actions handles basic automation, let’s repeat the same experiment for GitLab CI. GitLab offers a free tier of SaaS and also a free edition of the private GitLab Community Edition. GitLab offers the paid supported Enterprise platform edition, which is recommended for production workloads. Enterprise users have access to additional features than what Community Edition contains. Both the SaaS GitLab.com and private GitLab options can serve to follow the examples in this chapter. With an organization and admin access to a repository in GitLab, you will find GitLab runners are almost identical to GitHub runners. The user has the same option of managed or self-hosted runners. First, we need at least one runner to actually perform Packer builds. Similarly to GitHub, download and install the runner type needed. This can be a local self-hosted runner or a cloud or managed runner just like GitHub. GitLab has a...