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A pull request (PR) is (quite literally) a request to pull a change into a project’s code or documentation. It is a popular change management process supported by many VCS providers including GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Codeberg, and others. Typically these come with features to track open pull requests, tools to assist in reviewing the changes, the ability to approve—or reject—PRs, and finally to merge approved PRs.

Dynamic application security testing (DAST) is a critical security measure for modern software delivery pipelines. It involves evaluating the security of web applications by actively testing them in real-time, simulating real-world attacks to identify vulnerabilities. As the cybersecurity threat landscape has evolved, DAST has emerged as a key tool for enforcing application security in continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.

The zero trust security model is an approach to network security that enforces strict access controls and authentication at every stage of the software development lifecycle. It treats every user, device, and transaction as a security risk and uses the principle of least privilege to restrict access to sensitive resources and minimize the potential attack surface.

Static application security testing (SAST) involves analyzing source code to identify and address potential security vulnerabilities. Using SAST early in development identifies threats before they can affect a live environment. SAST is particularly important for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. These pipelines automate the integration of new code changes into the main codebase and deploy applications to production environments.

CircleCI supports GitLab as a version control system (VCS). In this tutorial you will learn how to set up your first CircleCI CI/CD pipeline for a project hosted on GitLab. As GitLab can be used either as a SaaS tool, as well as self-managed on-premise installation, I will cover the steps to connect it with CircleCI for both.