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Maven / GitLab CI Basics Interview Questions

What is the GitLab Container Registry and how do you use it in CI/CD pipelines?

The GitLab Container Registry is a built-in Docker image registry integrated with every GitLab project. It provides a private place to store and manage Docker images, directly accessible from CI/CD pipelines using predefined variables.

# Build and push to the GitLab Container Registry:
build-image:
  stage: build
  image: docker:27
  services:
    - docker:27-dind
  variables:
    DOCKER_TLS_CERTDIR: "/certs"
  before_script:
    - docker login -u $CI_REGISTRY_USER -p $CI_REGISTRY_PASSWORD $CI_REGISTRY
  script:
    - docker build -t $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:$CI_COMMIT_SHORT_SHA .
    - docker build -t $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:latest .
    - docker push $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:$CI_COMMIT_SHORT_SHA
    - docker push $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:latest

# Pull from registry in a later job:
deploy-job:
  stage: deploy
  script:
    - docker pull $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:$CI_COMMIT_SHORT_SHA
    - docker run -d $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:$CI_COMMIT_SHORT_SHA

Registry predefined variables
VariableValue
$CI_REGISTRYregistry.gitlab.com (or your instance's registry URL)
$CI_REGISTRY_IMAGEFull path: registry.gitlab.com/group/project
$CI_REGISTRY_USERGitLab CI token username (gitlab-ci-token)
$CI_REGISTRY_PASSWORDGitLab CI token (auto-generated job token)

The docker:dind (Docker-in-Docker) service is required when building Docker images inside a Docker-based runner. The DOCKER_TLS_CERTDIR variable enables TLS for Docker-in-Docker communication, which is required in modern versions of Docker.

Which predefined variable contains the full image path in the GitLab Container Registry?
What is 'docker:dind' used for in GitLab CI/CD?

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