Is it possible to have a job "when:manual" but ALSO trigger "only:schedule"?

GitLab CI/CD
1

Hello experts!

We have the following idea / use case:

  • heavy job (system end-2-end tests) that MAY take >10 mins

Our general requirements are:

  1. MUST NOT run this job on every commit
  2. MUST allow developers to manually run the job if necessary
  3. MAY auto-run the job on MERGE
  4. MUST allow the job to be triggered by schedule (nightly)

So I gravitated to this:

And then for the nightly:

For requirement (3) we may or may not do this.

–
So to the question - if we define a job that is both MANUAL as well as “only on schedule”, what is the theoretical outcome here?

2

I’m not sure how you integrate CI with the existing branches, but you’d want to split manual job and schedule job, somethings like following

.job-template:
  script:
  - sleep 600s

job-manual:
   extends: .job-template
   when: manual
   only:
   - merge_requests

job-merge:
   extends: .job-template
   only:
   - master
   - schedules
1 Like
3

Thanks @shinya, that is precisely what I was wondering about, and you have clarified. Any suggestion on improving the documentation? I could submit a PR easily. Was thinking to add clarification to the above-mentioned sections in terms of their interactions with one another (in fact they are mutually exclusive).

4

Off the top of my head, https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/examples/ would be a good place.

5

Updating this despite the age since it comes up in the top 10 on Google when searching for how to have a job trigger both manually and scheduled. It seems the latest advice is here: Choose when to run jobs | GitLab. Basically it looks like this:

job:
  script: echo "Hello, Rules!"
  rules:
    - if: $CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE == "merge_request_event"
      when: manual
      allow_failure: true
    - if: $CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE == "schedule"

In my case I changed “merge_request_event” to “push” as the former was resulting in “detached” pipelines that wouldn’t run the other non-manual jobs.

1 Like