Jobs and stages

Pipeline-as-Code

GitLab does not offer a visual pipeline editor

Pipelines are described in YAML

Pipelines are stored in .gitlab-ci.yml

Jobs

Minimal job:

job_name:
  script: pwd

script can be a string but is mostly an array:

job_name:
  script:
  - pwd
  - whoami

Jobs fail if any command fails (exit code > 0)

Jobs with herestrings

script supports all herestring variants of YAML

Literal multiline block:

job_name:
  script:
  - |
    pwd
    whoami

Use this for commands with URLs or the colon will break parsing

Shell here documents:

job_name:
  script:
  - |
    tr a-z A-Z <<EOF
    lower case to be converted to upper case
    EOF

Jobs and stages

Jobs represent isolated steps in a pipeline

Stages are executed sequentially

Jobs in the same stage are executed in parallel

Special stages .pre and .post

Hands-On

See chapter Jobs and stages

Pro tip: Skip pipeline for push

Sometimes a pipeline run is not desirable

Option 1

Skip pipeline by prefixing the commit message:

[skip ci] My awesome commit message

Option 2

Leave commit message untouched

Provide a push option:

git push -o ci.skip