Improving maintainability by combining multiple pipelines and leveraging parent-child pipelines

Most GitLab users simply utilize a single .gitlab-ci.yml file for their pipelines. This approach is perfectly acceptable, but in many cases, the amount of code inside this file can become very large and difficult to maintain. GitLab has introduced the ability to include multiple gitlab-ci files together as one. In this section, we’re going to cover how to break up a .gitlab-ci.yml file into multiple sections. Later, we’re going to cover how to take a second .gitlab-ci.yml file and execute a second child pipeline, and then discuss the reasons why you may want to do this.

Leveraging includes for maintainability

Create a .gitlab-ci.yml file that looks like this:

"Build Application":
  stage: build
  script:
    - code here
"Build Container":
  stage: build
  script:
    ...