Allow defining scheduled pipelines triggers as yaml

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Proposal

Currently, pipelines can only be triggered on a schedule using the UI (CI/CD -> Schedules), or REST API. Ideally, it should be possible to define schedules in the .gitlab-ci.yml file. This has several benefits, but most importantly, we can use a single schedule definition and share it with other projects using include. This also complies with our policies to define (as much as possible) "as code".

See: https://support.gitlab.com/hc/en-us/requests/182472

Intended users

• Devon (DevOps Engineer)

Proposal

Add a new top-level schedules keyword that allows defining multiple schedules directly from code. Proposed syntax:

schedules:
- name: Schedule name
  cron: * * * * *
  timezone: UTC # could come in future iteration
  target_branch: main
  variables: {} # could come in future iteration

Required fields:

• name
• cron

Field with defaults values:

• timezone: Defaults to UTC
• target_branch: Defaults to CI_DEFAULT_BRANCH
• variables: Defaults to an empty block {}

Design ideas/questions

• Which takes precedence in case of conflict between schedules block in the gitlab-ci.yml, schedules in UI or defined through the API? The last schedule change takes precedence