Centralized Globals

STATUS Sketchy: Author brainstormed ideas and recorded them - read with caution

We use the term "globals" to refer to YAML objects at the "root" level (leftmost column) of an element's YAML file that is NOT a job. Examples of "global" objects include:

• stages:
• default:
• workflow:
• global variables:
• base jobs (starting with ".")

Globals apply to all the jobs in a pipeline, including other elements added with include:. Furthermore, few of them are extensible (stages: for example), so different instances of the object in different elements might unintentionally override each other.

The all-global element

The base library includes an element at util/all-global intended to hold global values for use in all pipelines.

Recommendations

• Include util/all-global in every -pipe element

Usage

See the python/pypi-library-pipe element for an example of usage:

include:
  - local: 'util/all-global.gitlab-ci.yml'

Contents

The util/all-global element contains functionality to support patterns described in this guide throughout the library:

• Constants pattern
• SetEnv and GetEnv pattern
• Custom job images pattern
• Pipeline conditions pattern

It also includes:

• Definitions of stages to be used across all pipeline definitions - a longer and more granular, but still generalized, list of stages than provided by default in GitLab, to allow for more sophisticated pipelines. Ohter elements in the base library reference the stages defined here and expect them to occur in that order.
• A handy display function to highlight important output in job logs
• Default job image setting for alpine

The root-level default antipattern

TODO