Interaction between workflow:rules and rules

GitLab CI/CD
1

How does using workflow:rules at the top level interact with rules defined (or even not defined) in a job? I haven’t been able to find this in the documentation.

For more reference, I want to be able to combine the two so that I can run a single job on schedule.

First I want to (by default) disable all jobs from running on schedule

workflow:
  rules:
    - if: $CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE == "schedule"
      when: never

But I want this single job to run by essentially overriding the workflow:rules -

scheduled_job:
  stage: test
  script:
    - echo "I ran..."
  rules:
    - if: $CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE == "schedule"
      when: always

Clearly, this wont work because the pipeline will not be created in the first place. How can I achieve this functionality without changing ALL my jobs but by only changing workflow:rules and scheduled_job:rules?

3 Likes
2

You have to specify rules for reach job. Currently the workflow:rules determine if the pipeline is created as a whole, it is not possible to overwrite it with rules. workflow:rules does not function as default rules for all jobs. There is no interaction between those two.

1 Like
3

Thats what I thought. Wondering if anyone had any hacks. Thanks for your response.

4

I’m not sure if there are any useful hacks, but the other thing you can do with schedules is to set CI variables for them. For example:

        - if: $RUN_WEEKLY && $CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE == "schedule" && $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == $CI_DEFAULT_BRANCH
          when: always
        - if: $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == $CI_DEFAULT_BRANCH
          when: never
        - when: always

runs weekly on scheduled jobs on the default branch (e.g. master or main); never otherwise on the default branch (so it doesn’t run if $RUN_MONTHLY is set, or whatever); but does run on feature branches (for testing).

Sarah