The documentation at https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/caching/#cache-vs-artifacts says > Don’t use caching for passing artifacts between stages, as it is designed to store runtime dependencies needed to compile the project but the example in the documentation at https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/examples/artifactory_and_gitlab/#configure-gitlab-cicd-for-simple-maven-dep is using exactly the caching mechanism. The documentation should be updated to use the artifacts mechanism, because we recently encountered exactly this problem and deployed a wrong artifact with the pipeline.