Gitlab ci cd removes artifact for merge requests

Question

In my gitlab ci cd pipeline, i have two jobs :

• build : this job will be triggered after creating a pull request from the branch develop to a release branch. I will generate my project distribution (vuejs project), generate the version which is an environment variable (the version will be retrieved from the target branch name. if the target is release/1.0.0 then the version will be 1.0.0)
• publish : this job will get the artifact and create a docker image based on it. the version created in the last job will be the image tag.

build:
  image: node:15.5.1-alpine3.10
  stage: build
  before_script:
    # retrieve the new version from the branch name
    - version="$(echo $CI_MERGE_REQUEST_TARGET_BRANCH_NAME | cut -d '/' -f 2)"
    - echo "The new version to release is $version"
  script:
    - npm install -g @vue/cli
    - npm install
    - npm run build
    # write the version to the build.env so it can be used in the next jobs
    - echo "BUILD_VERSION=$version" >> build.env
    - cat build.env
  artifacts:
    when: on_success
    paths:
      - dist
    reports:
      dotenv: build.env
  # Run this job only when merge request on release and master branches
  rules:
    - if: ($CI_MERGE_REQUEST_TARGET_BRANCH_NAME =~ /^release\/\d+\.\d+\.\d+$/) && ($CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE == "merge_request_event")

As we can see below the version BUILD_VERSION env variable has been generated.

publish:quality:
  stage: publish
  image: docker:19.03.12
  services:
    - docker:19.03.12-dind
  variables:
    CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE: 'mouhamedali/co-training-gui'
  before_script:
    - echo " The build version is $BUILD_VERSION"
    - docker login --username mouhamedali --password-stdin < $GITLAB_DOCKER_HUB_TOKEN
  script:
    - docker pull $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE || true
    - echo "Building the docker image $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:$BUILD_VERSION"
    - docker build --cache-from "$CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE" -t "$CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:$BUILD_VERSION" .
    - docker push $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:$BUILD_VERSION
  dependencies:
    # get artifacts only from the build job
    - build
  only:
    - /^release\/\d+\.\d+\.\d+$/

but in the next job which is publish, the BUILD_VERSION is empty.

If i change the rule of the build job to be triggered after merging develop into release, it works fine and the version is present but absent if i change the rule to merge_requests so i don't why it does not work in the second case.

ci-cd file : https://gitlab.com/co-training/co-training-gui/-/blob/develop/.gitlab-ci.yml

Answer 1

The use of artifacts:reports:dotenv is not supported with dependencies:/needs:.

You can see this issue which calls for this to be better documented (details on this specific case in comments)

I've found that it's better to produce .env files as normal artifacts, then source them in subsequent jobs.

build:
  #...
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - build.env

release:
  before_script:
    - source build.env