From a Fresh VM to a Working CI/CD Pipeline

When working in a training lab or a self-hosted environment, you do not always start with a polished developer workstation. Sometimes you get a plain VM, a zipped project, a local GitLab instance, a local SonarQube server, and a deadline. This guide walks through the full process of going from a fresh Debian-based VM to a working CI/CD pipeline for a Python project using: VS Code Git GitLab SonarQube Docker optionally Docker Compose The environment used here is a local VM with GitLab available at http://gitlab.localdomain, SonarQube at http://localhost:9000, and a GitLab Runner already configured as a shell runner. 1. Boot the VM and verify the platform After starting the VM, do not rush immediately into GitLab. In this environment, GitLab may need around two minutes to finish booting. The VM documentation also indicates that Docker, Python 3, VS Code, GitLab, and SonarQube are already installed. Open a terminal and run: uname -a python3 --version git --version docker --version Then ch