Extend the CI Predefined Environment Variables with CI_COMMIT_TIMESTAMP

Problem to solve

The versioning paradigms have changed, deployments frequency jumped sky high and for application versioning the semantic versioning (i.e. 1.2.3) is not really feasible any more. Instead many of us are moving towards combinations of timestamps and commit references (short sha).
Having in mind the above plus the fact that in many cases the GitLab CI runners don't have git installed it would be very nice to have a predefined variable for the timestamp of the git commit.

Intended users

Further details

Goals
  • Simplify pipelines and allow flexible versioning

Proposal

variable name: CI_COMMIT_TIMESTAMP
value format: "2012-09-20T11:50:22Z" (ISO 8601)

Links / references

Edited by Nasko Vasilev