You're going into this wrong. Firstly, ask yourself a question: What problem do you want to be solved with Gitlab CI/CD or any other CI/CD tools? Gitlab CI/CD use case is deploying your code to a server automatically. It's a one-way direction. You could get it back via artefacts like other redditor has said or via some strange way but it's pointless and will cause you to turn away from Gitlab because it will end up being a big source of your stress. More on reddit.com

You could use predefined variables for 3. $GITLAB_USER_ID or $GITLAB_USER_LOGIN will resolve to the user that started the pipeline or, if in a manual job, the user that started the job. From there it's going to depend on how you want to define how the IP addresses are associated with the user id or login. Storing them as key value pairs in a JSON file in the repo and reading from it using something like jq would be my first option. Basically grab the ID using the GitLab variable and then lookup the corresponding ID in your "user-ips.json" file. More on reddit.com

Yes, there is a lot you can do. you can use extends: to reuse configuration. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/yaml_optimization.html#use-extends-to-reuse-configuration-sections You can put scripts in their own files. Don't forget to make them executable before you commit them, so you don't have to run chmod +x on them every time. You can use include to have smaller files and put merge them in a .gitlab-ci,yml https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/yaml_optimization.html#use-extends-and-include-together There are few more things you can do. What I wouldn't do, is to use yaml anchors. extends: is cleaner and has a simpler syntax. More on reddit.com

Can you do a video about doing a release using the pipeline and the release-cli?

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