Troubleshoot CICD pipeline execution

GitLab CI/CD
1

I’m working on a CICD pipeline that has rules on when certain jobs execute. Some jobs should always execute, while others only execute when merged into main, etc. It’s not behaving as I would expect and am interested if there is a way to report on past actions (merges, pushes, etc.) that shows why a pipeline/job did or didn’t execute.

2

I don’t think there’s anything quite like that. You can use the CI lint to validate your .gitlab-ci.yml and simulate a pipeline on the default branch, but that doesn’t help with feature branches, etc.

Your best bet might be to either:

  • turn on CI_DEBUG_TRACE for a while,
  • echo all the relevant variables to STDOUT, or
  • post a simplified version of your .gitlab-ci.yml file here.
1 Like
3

Thank you for your response. Basically here’s the workflow I’m currently aiming for. Admittedly, this will evolve.

I have a main branch that I create feature/bugfix branches from. These jobs should be triggered by creation or modification to files matching this rough regular expression. clusters/development/*/values.yaml. I push feature/bugfix branch to Gitlab and create an MR. No deployment should take place. I create an MR, get it approved, and it merges into main. Only then do I want the jobs to execute.

  only:
    changes:
      - clusters/**
    refs:
      - main
4

@kbreit

Reading the troubleshooting page and it seems you and I have the same problem.

The rules or only/except keywords are what determine whether or not a job is added to a pipeline. If a pipeline runs, but a job is not added to the pipeline, it’s usually due to rules or only/except configuration issues.

So that “Changes” you have is always evaluating to true in this case. I have a similar pipeline that runs too often with:

rules:
   if: '$CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == "master"'
    changes:
       - file1
       - file2
    when: always

Last time I inquired about a “only when certain files are changed on merge to the main branch” I was told “that is an interesting feature request”. Gitlab, afaik, has not moved quickly on this notion.

1 Like
5

Thank you very much! It is useful.