Understand Gitlab Environments

Environments in GitLab CI/CD provide isolated stages—development, testing, and production—so teams can build, verify, and release features without affecting live users. By separating concerns, you ensure:

• Safe feature development
• Thorough testing before rollout
• Clear visibility into what version is running

With each environment backed by distinct services (databases, vaults, APIs) and secured via credentials or API keys, GitLab CI/CD helps you:

• Organize deployments
• Protect secrets
• Audit deployment history

Key Concepts

Before exploring environment types, let’s define two fundamental terms:

Environments vs. Deployments

• Environment: A label representing a deployment target (e.g., development, staging, production).
• Deployment: An instance of your code pushed to an environment. GitLab tracks each deployment as a record.

Every deployment generates a history entry you can replay or rollback. This audit trail is essential for minimizing downtime and tracking changes over time.

Types of Environments

GitLab supports multiple environment categories. Choose the right one based on your workflow:

Static vs. Dynamic

• Static Environments:

  production:
    environment:
      name: production
      url: https://myapp.com
  

• Dynamic Environments:

  review/$CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME:
    environment:
      name: review/$CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME
      url: https://$CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME.myapp.com
      on_stop: stop_review
  

Review Apps & Protected Environments

• Review Apps: Spin up an isolated preview for every Merge Request.
• Protected Environments: Enforce approvals or specific roles before deployment.

Securing CI/CD Variables with Environment Scope

By default, all jobs inherit every CI/CD variable. To tighten security and manage configuration:

• Limit Exposure: Keep production secrets out of development logs.
• Environment-Specific Settings: Define separate values for each stage.
• Improve Performance: Smaller variable sets mean faster pipeline startup.

Example: Scoped Variables in GitLab UI

Further Reading

• GitLab CI/CD Variables Documentation
• GitLab Environments and Deployments
• Best Practices for GitLab Pipelines

By leveraging static, dynamic, review, and protected environments—alongside environment-scoped variables—you can build more secure, transparent, and efficient CI/CD workflows in GitLab.