The pages:deploy job should be in the same stage as the pages job

Hello,

I just implemented the pages job in order to use GitLab pages. As stated in the documentation, the pages:deploy job is a "magic" job that runs after the pages job. Our pages job is declared in a stage named publish that comes after the deploy stage.

It seems that the pages:deploy job is (always?) mapped to the deploy stage, regardless of the pages job's stage. However that does not prevent the deployment of pages to occur, it's more a matter of understanding/maintenance mainly in "big" pipelines (with many jobs/stages). Also, I didn't test what would happen if the deploy stage does not exist at all...

Therefore, I would suggest the pages:deploy job should be created at the same stage of the pages job (publish in my case). Also the pages:deployjob should also be allowed to fail if allow_failure is true.

Here is a small part of my .gitlab-ci.yml file to get a better idea of what happen:

stages:
  - build
  - test
  - deploy
  - validate
  - publish

# ... many jobs in different stages

deploy-job:
  stage: deploy
  script: ...

pages:
  stage: publish
  needs: [deploy-job]
  dependencies: [deploy-job]
  allow_failure: true
  script: ...
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - public

# pages:deploy will be in stage deploy instead of publish
# pages:deploy should be allowed to fail

Let me know if that sounds a good idea or if any more information is needed.

Best regards, Cedric

Implementation guide

Use the stage from the original pages job in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/blob/8c87749593710d4d7fd2c4de48a000286adc96dc/app/services/projects/update_pages_service.rb#L67