Best Practices: Deprecated Keywords, Caching, Artifact Expiration, and Image Pinning

Problem/Feature Description

A platform team is reviewing a .gitlab-ci.yml that was written before GitLab 14.x. The pipeline runs correctly today but the team has been warned it will break when GitLab completes the removal of deprecated keywords. Additionally, build times have increased 40% over the past quarter and the team suspects missing caches and inefficient artifact configuration.

Review the pipeline below for best practices violations. For each finding, explain the problem and its impact, and produce a fully improved version of the pipeline.

Output Specification

Produce:

• A corrected .gitlab-ci.yml with all best practice improvements applied
• A best-practices-report.md listing each finding with: category (deprecation/performance/reliability), job name, problem description, and fix applied

Input Files

The following file is provided as input.

=============== FILE: inputs/.gitlab-ci.yml =============== stages:

• install
• build
• test
• deploy

install_deps: stage: install image: node:latest script: - npm ci artifacts: paths: - node_modules/

build_app: stage: build image: node:latest script: - npm run build artifacts: paths: - dist/ only: - main - merge_requests

test_unit: stage: test image: node:latest script: - npm test except: - tags

test_e2e: stage: test image: cypress/base:latest script: - npx cypress run artifacts: paths: - cypress/screenshots/ - cypress/videos/ only: - main - merge_requests

deploy_production: stage: deploy image: alpine:latest script: - ./deploy.sh production only: - main