If you’ve worked with GitLab CI for any length of time you’ve probably needed to build a Docker image as part of a pipeline. The go-to solution is Docker-in-Docker (DinD) — running Docker inside a Docker container so your CI job can build and push images. It works, but it comes with enough quirks that it’s worth understanding what’s actually happening under the hood before you commit to it.

Getting Started with Terraform

Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool by HashiCorp that lets you define and provision infrastructure using a declarative configuration language (HCL).

Why Terraform?

• Cloud-agnostic - Works with AWS, GCP, Azure, and hundreds of providers
• State management - Tracks what’s deployed via a state file
• Plan before apply - See what will change before it happens

Basic Concepts

Providers

Providers are plugins that let Terraform talk to APIs:

Will It Cost Anything?

For a personal Hugo blog — no. Cloudflare Pages has a genuinely free tier that covers everything this site needs:

No credit card required. A Hugo blog typically deploys in under a minute and produces a few hundred files at most. You’d have to be doing something unusual to hit any of those limits.