Create a new project on GitLab and push your Terraform files on it. You can use either gitlab.com or your self hosted GitLab instance.

The cluster creation pipeline is triggered only on protected branches, so you have to protect every branch that will define a cluster (in Settings ⇒ Repository ⇒ Protected Branches).

There are multiple ways to configure the {terraform-provider-link}[Terraform {terraform-provider} provider]. You could commit the credentials in your code, with a high potential risk of secret leakage, or another simple solution is to define the required environment variables as CI/CD variables.

In your project’s Setting → CI/CD → Variables, add variables for:

Unresolved directive in pipelines_gitlab.adoc - include::partial$variables-{ci-variables}.adoc[]

In order to use Gitlab as Continuous Delivery, you have to create a .gitlab-ci.yml file in the root level of your project.

The pipeline, and hence the cluster creation, will be triggered when you push to a protected branch, but you can trigger a pipeline manually if needed (in CI/CD ⇒ Pipelines ⇒ Run Pipeline).