Pipeline conditions

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

The different pipeline types and conditions under which pipelines run can present challenges. Without attention, a project can end up with multiple pipelines running on the same push, pipelines triggering other pipelines in a loop, or simple confusion.

Guidelines and detailed pipeline types

In the base library, we define a more detailed set of pipeline types, then use a variable and the pipeline name in the UI to annotate them. The guidelines are:

• Never run tag pipelines; insead add release jobs to the same pipeline that creates the tag
• Only run branch pipelines on the default branch or specific branches (i.e. for hotfixes)
• Use merge request pipelines exclusively within merge request branches
• Try to avoid pipeline runs when the only activity is creating a branch with no changes
• If someone makes and pushes a branch outside of a merge request, do nothing
• Use global pipeline rules to control and annotate different types of operations

Referencing conditions

$CONDITION can be referenced in job-level rules. For example,

if: $CONDITION =~ /pipelinetest/

or

if: $CONDITION =~ /main|hotfix/

Defining conditions

The util/all-global element in the base library handles pipeline condition logic, sets the $CONDITION variable, and generates the correct title for the GitLab UI.