CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitlabgitlab-ci
abc
abc

Reputation: 85

Can a Gitlab CI pipeline job be configured as automatic when the prior stage succeeds, but manual otherwise?

I use Gitlab CI to deploy my service. Currently I have a single deploy job that releases my changes to every server behind a load balancer.

I would like do a phased rollout where I deploy to one server in my load balancer, give it a few minutes to bake and set off any alarms if there is an issue, and then automatically continue deploying to the remaining servers. If any issue occurred before the delayed full automatic deploy happened I would manually cancel that job to prevent the bad change from going out more widely.

With this goal in mind I configured my pipeline with the following .gitlab-ci.yml:

stages:
 - canary_deploy
 - full_deploy

canary:
 stage: canary_deploy
 allow_failure: false
 when: manual
 script: make deploy-canary

full:
 stage: full_deploy
 when: delayed
 start_in: 10 minutes
 script: make deploy-full

This works relatively well but I ran into a problem when I tried to push a critical change out quickly. The canary deploy script was hanging and this prevented the second job from starting as it must wait for the first stage to complete. In this case I would have preferred to skip the canary entirely but because of the way the pipeline is configured it was not possible to manually invoke the full deploy.

Ideally I would like the full_deploy stage to run on the typical delay but allow me to forcefully start it if I didn't want to wait. I've reviewed the rules and needs and when configuration options hoping to find a way to achieve my goal but I haven't been able to find a working solution.

Some things I've tried, without luck:

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1418

Answers (1)

Bernhard
Bernhard

Reputation: 36

One thing you could do to make duplicating the full_deploy job feel a little bit less "hacky" is to define it once and then use extends two times:

stages:
 - canary_deploy
 - full_deploy

.full:
  script: make deploy-full

canary:
 stage: canary_deploy
 allow_failure: false
 when: manual
 script: make deploy-canary

full_automatic:
  extends: .full
  stage: full_deploy
  when: delayed
  start_in: 10 minutes

full_manual:
  stage: full_deploy
  extends: .full
  when: manual
  needs: []

This way, you only need to define the scripts section once and both the full_manual and the full_automatic job use it. When running the pipeline, you can choose which job to run first (manual versus canary):

Screenshot of the GitLab UI for selecting which job to run

By specifying needs: [], you tell GitLab that the full_manual job does not depend on any other jobs and can be executed immediately without running jobs from canary_deploy before.

When executing full_manual, the canary job is not executed:

Overview of executed pipeline jobs

Upvotes: 2

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