📄️ Overview
GitLab CI/CD Pipelines view showing deploy stages
📄️ How to Deploy
GitLab pipelines showing deploy stages and redeploy options
📄️ MR Pipeline
Every merge request triggers a validation pipeline that gates code quality, security, builds, and test coverage before merge is allowed.
📄️ Manual Pipeline Inputs
Use GitLab Run pipeline when you need to run the manual release-lane flow with explicit input values instead of relying on the normal branch-driven develop promotion path.
📄️ Updating Environment Variables
All environment variables are managed through dotenv.org and encrypted into .env.vault for deployments. The vault is rebuilt automatically in CI before every deploy -- no manual build or commit needed.
📄️ Deployment
Fastlane now has two deployment lanes:
📄️ Environments
Five environments make up the Fastlane deployment topology. develop owns the governed promotion lane through all five environments, while the release lane allows release/* branches to target only the lower environments (dev, qa, uat).
📄️ Docker Builds
All apps use multi-stage Docker builds with a shared pattern: base -> dependencies -> build -> production. The two build patterns diverge at the production stage -- frontend apps serve static files via nginx, while the API gateway runs a Node.js process.
📄️ Hotfix Flow
Hotfixes are urgent production fixes that bypass the normal develop -> dev -> qa -> uat -> staging -> prod promotion chain. They merge directly to main and deploy to production, then automatically backport to develop.
📄️ Secrets Vault
Fastlane uses dotenv-vault for encrypted secret management. All environment variables for every deployed environment live in a single encrypted file (.env.vault) that is safe to commit to Git. The file is useless without its decryption key, which is stored separately in GitLab CI/CD variables.
📄️ Fast Prod Deploy
Skip the full environment chain (dev → qa → uat → staging) and deploy directly to production from the develop branch. Useful when the code has already been validated in lower environments and you need a quick production push.