`Required` variables for jobs

Description

Gitlab offers way to provide CI/CD variables that jobs can consume.

What happens if a "required"/"needed" variable is not available to the job? My thought is it should fail/pause until added.

The workaround today is to do a script variable check, i.e. If (!(Test-Path variable:global:foo)) {Throw "Variable foo is missing..."}. This seems very ugly.

Proposal

Add a required_vars entry for job definition, ensuring a job doesn't run without missing a variable dependency.

job1
  stage: stage1
  script:
    - Echo $MyPipelineVAR
  required_vars:
    - MyPipelineVAR

Links / references

This specifically affected Production/non-test environments as test environments had dynamically generated variables where as Prod environments uses variables generally entered into Gitlab CI/CD settings page. #tookdownprod