GitLab CI/CD Interview Questions — All Categories
17 questions tagged with GitLab CI/CD as a technology, across every category it appears in
A teammate used 'cache' to pass compiled build output from the build job to the deploy job, and it intermittently fails to find the files. What did they get wrong?
IntermediateGitLab CI/CD6 min
You have a monorepo where a single commit might touch 1 service or 15. How would you use GitLab's dynamic child pipelines so you only run CI for the services that actually changed?
AdvancedGitLab CI/CD8 min
A shared library lives in its own GitLab project, consumed by 5 downstream application projects. How would you trigger those downstream pipelines automatically when the library changes?
IntermediateGitLab CI/CD6 min
Your GitLab pipeline runs 6 stages sequentially, but half your jobs don't actually depend on each other. How would you use 'needs' to speed this up?
IntermediateGitLab CI/CD6 min
How do you make sure a production deployment token stored as a CI/CD variable can only ever be used by pipelines running against your main branch, not a random feature branch?
IntermediateGitLab CI/CD6 min
A new job you added to .gitlab-ci.yml is stuck 'pending' forever and never picked up by any runner. What's the most likely cause, and how do you fix it?
BeginnerGitLab CI/CD5 min
What's the difference between a branch pipeline and a merge request pipeline in GitLab CI, and why does it matter which one actually runs for a given push?
IntermediateGitLab CI/CD7 min
What debugging challenge does a GitLab merged results pipeline introduce that a plain branch pipeline doesn't, when a job fails?
IntermediateGitLab CI/CD6 min
How would you write .gitlab-ci.yml rules to prevent duplicate pipelines from firing for both a branch push and its merge request?
IntermediateGitLab CI/CD6 min
How does GitLab's pipeline trigger distinction compare to GitHub Actions' push vs pull_request trigger?
IntermediateGitLab CI/CDGitHub Actions6 min
How would you configure GitLab merge request approval rules so that changes to a payments module always require sign-off from the payments team specifically, not just any two approvers?
IntermediateGitLab CI/CD6 min
A teammate accidentally merged a merge request that was still a work in progress, because nothing in GitLab's workflow signaled it wasn't ready. How would you prevent this going forward?
BeginnerGitLab CI/CD5 min
Two approved merge requests are merged to main within minutes of each other, and the second one breaks the build even though it passed CI on its own branch. How does GitLab's merge trains feature prevent this?
IntermediateGitLab CI/CD6 min
A compliance requirement mandates that every commit merged into a regulated project be cryptographically signed and traceable to a verified author. How would you enforce this in GitLab?
AdvancedGitLab CI/CD7 min
Reviewers keep approving frontend PRs based on reading the diff alone, and subtle visual bugs keep slipping through to production. How would GitLab Review Apps address this?
IntermediateGitLab CI/CD6 min
A merge request's 'Merge' button is greyed out with the widget stuck on 'Checking if merge request can be merged...' indefinitely, even though the pipeline passed. How do you debug this?
IntermediateGitLab CI/CD6 min
What's the difference between a "Protected" and a "Masked" GitLab CI/CD variable, and why would you want both on the same variable?
BeginnerGitLab CI/CD5 min