Weird variables behavior in rules

GitLab CI/CD
1

Hi all

I am seeing a weird behavior in my CI/CD configuration. I have a job, which I want to run if one of my many DEPLOY variables is set to “true”. If I evaluate each variables separately, such as

rules:
  - if: $DEPLOY_TO_PROD == "true" || $DEPLOY_TO_PREPROD == "true" || $DEPLOY_TO_TEST == "true"

This configuration works fine, as long as at least one DEPLOY_TO_ var is set to true, job is created. However, I wanted to make this shorter and more universal by using this

variables:
  DEPLOY_TO_PROD: "true"
  DEPLOY_TO_PREPROD: "false"
  DEPLOY_TO_TEST: "true"

  DEPLOY_TO_ANY: ${DEPLOY_TO_PROD}${DEPLOY_TO_PREPROD}${DEPLOY_TO_TEST}

job1:
  rules:
    - if: $DEPLOY_TO_ANY =~ /true/

Basically, I concatenate three strings and then try to look if there’s at least ONE true using regex. However, this does not work. Job is not created no matter what I put into regex. I’ve tried:

  • /true/
  • /^.*true/
  • /^.*?true/
  • /tru/

Job is not created. What am I doing wrong?

Interestingly, the job is also not created if I do

  rules:
    - if: $DEPLOY_TO_ANY == "truefalsetrue" # This reflects values of global vars as shown above
    - if: $DEPLOY_TO_ANY == ""

But it is created if I do:

  rules:
    - if: $DEPLOY_TO_ANY

So, $DEPLOY_TO_ANY is set to something… it is not empty, but what it is I’ve no idea.
Within the script, if I do echo $DEPLOY_TO_ANY it prints truefalsetrue, but clearly this is not the value visible to rules.