Variable from text file

GitLab CI/CD
, ,
1

Hey there,

I’m trying to write a .gitlab-ci.yml file, and I want to retrieve a variable from a text file.

The text file looks like this:

2024-02-25

Here’s the gitlab-ci.yml:

variables:
  DOCKER_IMG_DEV_TAG: $(cat scripts/dev_image_tag.txt)

(^ This is not working ^)

This tag tells Kubernetes which image version it needs to use.

Any help will be appreciated.

2

variables as configuration attribute are static at configuration parse time. If you want to populate the variables at runtime, environment variables can be helpful.

If the date is generated in a previous job, you could write it into a .env artifact, and then load this variable into the environment in a follow-up job.

A more simplified approach could be exporting the environment variable using export.

build-job:
  script:
    - export DOCKER_IMG_DEV_TAG=$(cat scripts/dev_image_tag.txt)

but can also be combined with .env.

build-job:
  stage: build
  script:
    - echo "DOCKER_IMG_DEV_TAG=$(cat scripts/dev_image_tag.txt)" >> build.env
  artifacts:
    reports:
      dotenv: build.env

test-job:
  stage: test
  script:
    - echo "$DOCKER_IMG_DEV_TAG"

I’ve created an MR with a test pipeline in dot-env (!25) · Merge requests · Michael Friedrich / ci-cd-playground · GitLab

image

image
image1600×1147 352 KB

image
image1600×1147 299 KB

1 Like
3

Hey,

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.

Your advice really came in handy, and although I took a different approach to solve the problem, your guidance was super helpful.

1 Like
4

Glad you could solve it. Would you mind adding your solution to this thread, so that others can benefit from your approach? Thanks :slight_smile:

1 Like
5

Sure,
but I just changed the text file to yaml and include it like this:

image_tag.yml:

variables:
  DOCKER_IMG_TAG: "2024-03-09"

.gitlab-ci.yml:

include: 'image_tag.yml'

and then i use DOCKER_IMG_TAG as a regular variable.

1 Like
6

Oh nice, did not think of includes with variables :slight_smile:

1 Like