1. Repositories & SSH/HTTPS Authentication 2. Project & Group Hierarchy Level Purpose Contains Group Organization Subgroups, projects Subgroup Team Subgroups, projects Project Repository Code, issues, MRs, CI/CD 3. Merge Requests (MRs) 4. Protected Branches Role Can Push to main? (Default) Guest No Reporter No Developer No (protected) Maintainer Yes Owner Yes 5. .gitlab-ci.yml Basic Structure…
A migration is not a clone. A clone copies the Git history. A migration copies the history, the issues, the merge requests, the comments, the labels, the milestones, and the wiki pages, and it attempts to map the original authors to GitLab users. The LFCS exam does not test GitLab, but the GitLab Certified Associate…
A pipeline that runs and a repository that stores code are not, by themselves, a measure of software delivery performance. GitLab provides analytics features that answer the questions that matter to engineering leadership: how long does it take from idea to production, where is the bottleneck in the workflow, and what is the team’s throughput?…
The previous chapters covered the GitLab UI, the CI/CD pipeline, and the access control model. This chapter covers the mechanisms that allow external systems to interact with GitLab programmatically: webhooks, which push events to an external URL, and the REST/GraphQL API, which allows an external system to query and modify GitLab resources. The LFCS exam…
The previous chapters covered the CI/CD pipeline and its security scanners. This chapter covers the permission model that governs who can do what within a project. GitLab’s access control is built on roles: Guest, Reporter, Developer, Maintainer, and Owner. Each role is a bundle of permissions. The exam tests the distinction between the roles, the…
The previous chapters covered process monitoring with top and htop, and system-wide metrics with vmstat and iostat. This chapter covers two smaller, focused commands that answer two of the most common questions: free, which reports the memory usage, and uptime, which reports the system load average and uptime. Both commands are part of the procps…
The previous chapter covered process monitoring with top and htop, which show the CPU and memory usage of individual processes. This chapter covers the system-wide monitoring tools that reveal the aggregate state of memory, swap, I/O, and CPU: vmstat and iostat. These tools answer a different question. top answers “which process is using the CPU?”…
The previous chapters covered logs and their rotation. This chapter covers real-time process monitoring: the top command, which is available on every Unix-like system, and htop, which is the enhanced interactive alternative. Both tools show a snapshot of the running processes, updated at a configurable interval. The LFCS exam tests the interpretation of the top…
The previous chapter covered the rsyslog configuration: the rules that write messages to text files under /var/log/. This chapter covers the mechanism that prevents those files from growing indefinitely. The logrotate command is a scheduled utility that rotates, compresses, removes, and mails log files. It is not a daemon; it is a process invoked by…
The systemd journal is the default log store on modern Linux distributions, but it is not the only one. The rsyslog daemon runs alongside the journal and writes traditional text files to /var/log/. It is the mechanism that produces /var/log/syslog, /var/log/auth.log, /var/log/messages, and /var/log/kern.log. The LFCS exam tests the configuration syntax of /etc/rsyslog.conf, the rule…