Triggering builds ONLY via API

GitLab CI/CD
1

Hi everyone. Been using Gitlab for a while, but just getting around to exploring the whole CI aspect. I have a need that hopefully can be easily addressed.

Our project is huge at almost 2GB for a build. I don’t want to trigger a build for every commit - especially since we commit code all day long in short bursts (due to the nature of this project). What I would like to do is only trigger a build via an on-demand script/job, rather than for every commit.

I understand that by putting the “[skip ci]” primitive in the commit message that it will skip the build process, but with the number of commits we do on a daily basis, invariably, someone is going to forget to do that and trigger this huge build process.

I know I can create a build trigger that I can ping via cURL or what not, but how can I work around the “every commit triggers a build” thing more easily than the “[skip ci]” approach?

Thanks in advance for any ideas!

Cheers.

1 Like
2

I thought I had figured it out, but alas, I hit a brick wall again lol.

I removed the .yml file so it wouldn’t trigger builds for every commit. But when I ping the API via cURL, it just responds with “{“message”:“No builds created”}”. :frowning:

I must be missing something lol.

3

You must have a .gitlab-ci.yml in order to perform a build. How else would the Runner know what to run?

What you want is to pass a variable to a trigger and run the script with an if clause. I guess it should work.

Another option is to use only and except in your jobs, so that you could allow the builds to run only on tags.

4

Makes sense! Thanks for the guidance. I’ll give it a go and see how I fare :smile:

Cheers.

5

At present you can add this in all the jobs of your .gitlab-ci.yml:

myjob:
    only:
      - triggers

See http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/ci/yaml/README.html#only-and-except
May be this was not existing when this thread was created.