organized in cooperation with Helmholtz Information & Data Science Academy (HIDA) and Helmholtz Federated IT Services (HIFIS)
Continuous Integration (CI)
What is continuous integration and why do we need it? Figure the following scenario:
A team of scientists is working on a little project that takes astronaut data from Wikidata to analyse the time humans spent in space as well as the age distribution of the astronauts. The project quickly gained attraction and a lot of users as well as contributors joined the project. After some time it became hard for the maintainers to ensure new functionality is properly tested. It also frequently happened that contributors followed a different code style or forgot to add license information.
Verifying those criteria manually is tedious and not promising in the long run. This is why the team aims at automating as much as possible to save their valuable time. Luckily, they found a tool called GitLab CI which they can use to automate those tasks.
The following contents await you during the three course days:
Day 1: Containerized solutions can be helpful in the testing stage of continuous integration. This day will focus on how to use containerized solutions for scientific projects using Docker as an example.
Day 2: With continuous integration in GitLab, you can automate the building, testing, and deploying of your code. This day will focus on creating an initial GitLab CI pipeline.
Day 3: Building on day 2, you will learn advanced concepts of GitLab CI useful for optimizing the pipeline.
Participants should make sure that they can log in to codebase.helmholtz.cloud via the Helmholtz ID before participating in the workshop.
Learning Goals
By the end of the course, you will be able to …
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Understand the basic concepts of containerization
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Perform basic operations with Podman or Docker
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Understand the concepts of Continuous Integration
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Implement your own CI pipeline using GitLab CI
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Apply advanced optimization techniques for your GitLab CI pipeline
Prerequisites
Participants should have basic programming skills, be familiar with the basic operations of Git, and GitLab and ideally already have made some initial experience with a Unix-shell. No further software needs to be installed.
Target Group
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Research Software Engineer
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Scientists who code
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Scientists who want to make use of automization
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Everyone else who wants to get started with Continuous Integration
Course Days & Times
June 25, 2025, 9 am - 3 pm
June 26, 2025, 9 am - 3 pm
June 27, 2025, 9 am - 3 pm
NOTE: Registration will open May 28, 2025, 12 pm.
Attendance & Certificates
The course content is coordinated, so we strongly recommend that you do not miss any part of the course. To receive a certificate we expect full time and active participation.
Registration & Cancellation
This course is open to individuals affiliated with Helmholtz or a HIDA Partner only.
Your registration for this course is binding. If you need to leave/miss the course for a period of time, please let us know in advance via hida-courses@helmholtz.de.
If you have to cancel the course for any reason, please do so as soon as possible to allow time for others to take your seat. To cancel, please withdraw your registration on the course site or write an email to hida-courses@helmholtz.de.
Additional Information
There is no waiting list for this course! If someone withdraws from a course, their place is automatically reopened. We therefore advise you to keep an eye on the registration in case the course is fully booked and you would like to attend. Also, this course will be offered again in the future - you can check our HIDA course catalog for updates.
This course is free of charge.
