Continuous integration for Laravel applications with GitLab

Abstract

Modern software development industries are willing to use Continuous Integration (CI) instead of traditional integration for their changing business requirements. Developers are facing challenges in manual processes like code review, code merging, and code testing when they integrate their code frequently. CI is one of the most popular and commonly aspired to agile practices. CI checks in a change, checks out all the sources, builds everything, runs all the unit tests and reports back with immediate feedback. GitLab is a powerful version controlling system and GitLab offers the built-in continuous integration and delivery tool called GitLab CI. This paper proposes the implementation of GitLab CI to support CI pipelines in all Laravel applications with real-world scenarios. It describes how development processes are carried out using CI and how GitLab CI reduces the integration risks by waiting to merge the work of all developers during the development cycle. It provides a generalized GitLab CI process to use readily in all Laravel applications.