CI: Hide or temporarily “disable“ a job from a included template file

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Release notes

Allow to hide or temporarily “disable” a job from a included template file.

t.b.d.

Problem to solve

As a DevOps Engineer I want to deactivate a CI job inherited from a included template file to remove jobs not yet supported/allowed/wanted in a project setup.

When a DevOps Engineer includes one or many templates in a CI configuration, then it may be necessary to deactivate a job originating in another template. For example the template includes many jobs of which one single job is not supported or allowed in the current project.

Content of template project https://example.com/autodevops-template.yml

job1:
  script: echo Apple

job2:
  script: echo Banana

job3:
  script: echo Pepper

Content of current project .gitlab-ci.yml:

include: 'https://example.com/autodevops-template.yml'

job4:
  script: echo Melon

The current project wants all jobs except for job3 (Pepper).

Current workarounds:

  • Go without the include feature and copy and paste all jobs from the template repository file except for job3
  • Hide the job in the template repository by starting its name with a dot (.) → this however would deactivate the job in all other projects which include the template file as well
  • Overwrite the rules list with a rule which will never succeed → This will still display the job as available in Linter of the »Pipeline Editor«, it will not be executed though
job3:
  rules:
    - when: never

Intended users

DevOps Engineer, Software development

User experience goal

The user should be able to deactivate an inherited job in the current project using a defined path (and no workarounds instead).

Proposal

Idea 1:

  • Allow the value never in when keyword, outside of rules/workflow statements
job3:
  - when: never

Idea 2:

  • Allow a YAML parser syntax to remove keys, like >> oder null 
job3: >>

Links / references

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/README.html#includefile https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/includes.html#overriding-external-template-values https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/README.html#hide-jobs https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/README.html#when

Edited by 🤖 GitLab Bot 🤖