Retiring Early Adopter plan: environment variables not passing to runner

Hi all,

We are experiencing some malfunction with our CI pipelines since today, october 8 2018.

Our pipelines scripts are failing because they’re not receiving defined custom variables, and the Envrionment part at the CI Variables Setup is missing.

Somebody is having this issue too?

Regards.

Hi, welcome to the GitLab forum :slight_smile:

Before someone can give you a hand, could you please share more information about your setup? For instance, at a minimum

  • Is it on gitlab.com or self-hosted?
  • If self-hosted, which GitLab version?

Thanks!

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Hello and thanks for your reply.

It is on gitlab.com
Do you need any further information you consider relevant from our setup?

Thanks and regards.

If you could mention whether you are on the Free plan or on one of the paid ones, that would make it easier to figure out your issue. Optionally, the URL to your project(s), if they happen to be public.

If we’re talking about the same feature, variable environment scopes is only available on the Silver/Premium tiers and higher.

If you are on a paid plan, is your subscription up to date?

Hi David,

I’m working with Pedro managing the same project.

Maybe we got out of a Silver/Bronze plan this weekend, I must check with the project owner, but reading the doc, I understand we can use variables with a Free plan, but we cannot use Environments, is this right?

Thanks and regards.

Hi,

I’m not an expert on that part of GitLab, but that’s what I understand from the documentation, yes. It would seem that you can in fact use Environments with the Free plan, but not in conjunction with variables.

I’d recommend to double-check the status of your subscription if you’ve got one. Regardless, you should always feel free to ask questions on the forum, but if you’ve got a paid plan, you have also got access to commercial support.

Hi @dplanella

I’m almost sure that we’ve change to free plan, in any case, we have already found how to continue.

We just recreated the variables with different names and fix our CI script to handle the new variables and it’s working fine again.

It seems the old variables could not be used with the new plan.

Thanks and regards.

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Great, thanks for the update and glad you’ve figured it out.

In that case, would you mind marking the reply that helped you solve your question as the accepted answer? You can do this with the checkbox icon that appears at the bottom of every post.

The forum lives from everyone’s feedback! :slight_smile:

There was no reply that helped to solve.

I thought that Gitlab couldn’t fail on something like this, just read the doc again and made a few tries with a little bit of creativity.

:stuck_out_tongue:

Oh, I thought the issue had been the move from a paid plan to the free one, thus the feature not being there anymore. I hope that I could at least help you pointing you in the right direction :slight_smile:

Hi all,

All my pipelines stops to work correctly after end of Early Adopter Plan.

It is not good =(

I can set new variables in the UI and they passed to runner correctly.

All old variables which was set before plan migration are visible in UI but unavailable in runner…

I was on the Early Adopter plan also, and am seeing the same issue.

In addition, when I attempt to save a new variable under settings => CI/CD / variables, I get a ‘Validation failed’ error claiming a number of existing variables are ‘already taken’.

Also, I disagree that @j.ortega.traverso workaround resolves this issue. I really don’t want to have to re-create hundreds of variables across dozens of repos and rewrite the pipeline definitions for each.

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I was able to create variables with the same names and values. They was passed to runner.

This is also affecting us (gitlab.com, not self hosted). Everything was working fine until I got into the office on Monday. I can no longer figure out which variables are meant to go with which environment. Originally I had prefixed them with the relevant environment (e.g. TEST_DJANGO_ENV), but when Gitlab made environment variables scoped to the relevant environment I removed the prefixes and adjusted our build scripts.
Thankfully this has just broken our test and staging environments, but it would have been nice to have this communicated to us in some way rather than just having it break.

Thanks for the feedback here. I’m sorry to read that this change came as a surprise, it wasn’t the intent. If you’d like to immediately get unblocked here, you can sign up for a Gold trial to restore this functionality. (https://about.gitlab.com/2018/09/19/free-trial-gitlab-gold/)

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It is temporary workaround…

Could you point us to some documentation as to what exactly changed?

Thanks!

It’d be great to see when this was changed, only because the timing doesn’t seem to align with the blog post (this only seemed to be an issue from last Friday onwards ~7th Oct).
The existing variables need to removed as well not just prefixed all variables were still scoped to the relevant environment and were not being sent through to the runner. Maybe the interface could be modified to take into account these edge cases (if has scoped variables but not on the relevant plan show an alert message).

In terms of the timeline and announcements, here’s an overview

  • Sept 1, 2017: Early Adopter plan announcement
  • Sept 1, 2018: original date for end of Early Adopter plan, extended
  • Sept 5, 2018: planning for Early Adopters rollot to Free plan starts. Early Adopter Plan extended to Oct 1st
  • Sept 19, 2018 - Free trials of GitLab Gold announced as an option for easy transition
  • Sep 21, 2018 - E-mail sent to Early Adopter Plan subscribers: plan is being retired, but extended to 1st October 2018 to help with transition.
  • Oct 1st, 2018: end of Early Adopter plan (the actual rollout happened a few days after, reportedly on Oct 8th)

In summary, the plan start/end were announced publicly and opt-in subscribers were directly contacted. The planning for the roll-out was also planned in the open as an issue, keeping up with GitLab’s transparency values. To ease transition, the end of the plan was extended and an additional opt-in plan was offered.

I realize that despite these outreach efforts, not everyone could be notified and reminded of the upcoming plan changes. That’s where your feedback is important. If you have any suggestions on how to improve the process for the next campaign, we’d love to hear them.

As an immediate piece of input, what I hear is that the actual impact of ending the plan could have been communicated in more detail to avoid confusion. You can compare the feature availability when moving from to the Silver to Free plan here:

And for a more granular listing of the additional features included in the Early Adopter Plan:

That should be the full set of features that were disabled when migrating from Early Adopter to Free.

Thank you all for the constructive feedback so far. It’s also great to see forum members helping each other with suggestions and solutions as issues come up.

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