Building an example CD pipeline

Let's put all of these skills together once again using the GitLab CI as an example to build our pipeline. Following the testing step, we will add two more steps, one that creates the package and another one that uses Ansible to deploy this package.

All we need for the packaging step is the following:

# Package the application and publish the artifact
package:
  stage: package
  # Use cpack for packaging
  script:
    - cd build
    - cpack .
  # Save the deb package artifact
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - build/Customer*.deb

When we add the package step containing artifacts definitions, we'll be able to download them from the dashboard.

With this, we can invoke Ansible as part of the deployment step:

# Deploy using Ansible
deploy:
  stage: deploy
  script:
    - cd build
    - ansible-playbook -i localhost, ansible.yml

The final pipeline would then look like the following:

cache:
  key: all
  paths:
    - .conan
    - build

default:
  image: conanio/gcc9

stages:
...