Provide a way to use an environment for non-deployment jobs

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Problem to solve

Provide a way to use an environment without actually deploying to it.

Intended users

Developers

Further details

Lets assume we use the following .gitlab-ci.yml:

stages:
  - preview
  - deploy

preview:dev:
  stage: preview
  image: ${CI_IMAGE_KUBERNETES}
  script:
    - kubectl diff -f manifests/
  environment:
    name: dev

deploy:dev:
  stage: deploy
  image: ${CI_IMAGE_KUBERNETES}
  script:
    - kubectl apply -f manifests/
  environment:
    name: dev
  when: manual

In this particular case, we are using GitLab Kubernetes integration. Thus, we need to specify environment section to get proper kubeconfigs for the environment.

What we want to achieve in CI configuration above is to run some checks/previews against an environment and then deploy to that environment in the next stage.

However, when we specify environment section, GitLab always assumes that we are deploying to the environment. But we actually don't deploy in "preview" job.

Proposal

GitLab should not always assume that we are deploying to the environment just only using the fact we are using it. We should provide a flexible way to mark actions as "deployments" and possibly others (e.g. previews, rollbacks, etc).

One solution could be introducing new option "action" that specifies our intent, e.g.:

preview:dev:
  stage: preview
  image: ${CI_IMAGE_KUBERNETES}
  script:
    - kubectl diff -f manifests/
  environment:
    name: dev
    action: preview

Using this method, GitLab marks the job as a "deployment" only when action == deploy. Of course, we should keep backwards compatibility, so if no action is specified, we assume action = deploy by default.

Another more simple approach is to introduce deploy parameter:

preview:dev:
  stage: preview
  image: ${CI_IMAGE_KUBERNETES}
  script:
    - kubectl diff -f manifests/
  environment:
    name: dev
    deploy: false

This way we can mark jobs that are using the environment but not actually deploy anything into it. And again, we keep deploy = true by default to maintain backwards compatibility.