Waiting for CI to finish slows down development and can be extremely annoying, especially when CI fails and you have to run it again. Let’s take a look into approaches on how to speed up your CI and minimize the inefficient time spent by developers when waiting on CI to finish.

Gitlab stores a vast majority of their functionality into their paid packages. Group webhooks is one of them and if your using a group runner, the group webhook becomes sought after. This is easily achievable without using a paid plan by creating reusable templates. Gitlab offers great functionality for configuring your CI with include and exclude functions. These can be reused to create a base template for all your CI jobs.

Writing Gitlab CI templates becomes repetitive when you have similar applications running the same jobs. If a change to a job is needed it will be most likely needed to do the same change in every repository. On top of this there is a vast amount of excess YAML code which is a headache to maintain. Gitlab CI has many built-in templating features that helps bypass these issues and in addition helps automating the process of setting up CI for various applications.