Deployment docs need improvement

I've been looking to move to gitlab-ci from an existing drone.io setup. We have found most things to be straightforward to migrate to gitlab-ci, including the base build docker image we had created for use with drone, which worked out of the box on our gitlab-multi-runner instance.

In drone, one is able to set up a deployment over ssh (rsync over ssh actually) with an ssh key which is setup by the runner. Is there a similar facility in gitlab-ci, or do we need to eg. add a private variable to each repository with some private key and write the file as part of the deploy job?

It's a little confusing, as we've done that but are still having issues being able to make a successful ssh connection to a destination server.

Additionally, I'm not really sure if there are artifacts left over from the build that can be deployed or if the deploy script steps need to just be part of the build job (in which case, what's the point?).

I'd be glad to contribute some docs on how to acheive ssh based deployments with gitlab-ci if i can get some guidance on how exactly to acheive it.