I'm currently trying to teach myself about CI/CD. I understand the concept of pipelines, but whenever I try to dig deeper into how to actually create one and use it, I find myself staring at a wall of overwhelming information with no obvious place to grab onto and start climbing.

The background on this is (prepare to be appalled) that I've worked as a C# programmer for more than 8 years now, creating applications to be used internally within our company. Myself and my manager are the only two programmers within the company, and most of what I learned about software development, I learned from my manager, and have been doing things his way for those 8 years.

His way of deploying an application? Hit "Build" in Visual Studio, then zip up the files in the "bin/Release" folder, copy the zip file onto the target machine and extract the files. Other software developers I've told about this have been...flabbergasted.

We use github for source control, but my impression is that we don't use it the way it's supposed to be used. We both generally work on our own projects, and rarely have to integrate code, so source control is pretty much a just a way to back up our code and synchronise our home and office development machines. At the end of each day I go to the Team Explorer view in Visual Studio, commit and push my code. And if I'm working from home the next day, I pull it the same way.

So I'm looking into CI/CD from a position of (I think) near total ignorance of how this stuff is usually used. And what I'm looking for is some sort of very simple tutorial for how to do something very basic in GitLab. The simplest possible framework that I can then build from, but I haven't been able to find anything that doesn't immediately hit me with complexities that I'm not yet equipped to understand.

I want to know how, in GitLab, to set up a pipeline that will:

1. Build my code after I push it from Visual Studio (I've figured how to push to a GitLab repo already.)

2. Deploy it back to a specified folder on my development machine.

That's it. No testing stage or anything like that. Just push-build-deploy to a single machine. Can anyone help me with something like that?