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DevOps / Gitlab Interview questions

What is GitLab Flow?

GitLab Flow is a lightweight branching strategy recommended by GitLab that sits between the simplicity of GitHub Flow and the heavier structure of Git Flow. It keeps a single long-lived main branch as the source of truth, adds environment or release branches only when actually needed, and relies on merge requests for every change.

  • Feature work happens on short-lived branches created from main.
  • Every change lands via a merge request, never a direct push.
  • Optional environment branches (like staging, production) can track what's deployed where.
  • Release branches are cut only when a project genuinely needs to support multiple versions in parallel.

The goal is to avoid Git Flow's heavy develop/release/hotfix branch ceremony for teams that don't need it, while still giving teams that ship to multiple environments a clear, agreed-upon pattern.

GitLab Flow is best described as:
In GitLab Flow, changes typically reach main via:

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