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thebaconator
thebaconator

Reputation: 313

Can I reference another project in a gitlab pipeline instead of cloning it?

I am totally new to gitlab pipelines so I'm not really sure what the best way of doing this would be. I've read about submodules and dependencies, triggering other pipelines, but I I'm having a hard time understanding what would help with what I am trying to achieve here.

I have project_b that is a submodule of project_a. In project_b's .gitlab-ci.yml, project_a is currently being cloned, and then project_b is moved to where the submodule normally sits in project_a:

...
default:
...
    before_script:
        - git clone (project_a)
        - mv project_a /src
        - rm -rf /src/submodules/project_b/*
        - mount --bind /src/submodules/project_b
...

This is because project_b is dependent on project_a.

Though, from what I understand, that means project_b is downstream from project_a.

I don't want to have to clone the whole project_a repo every time that I run the project_b pipeline.

I've seen plenty of info about triggering downstream pipelines for dependent projects, but the only thing I could find that seemed like it related to my case here was this question asked awhile ago about gitlab lacking the feature to trigger an upstream pipeline instead: Upstream triggering in Gitlab-CI aka pipeline dependencies

Has this feature been added? Because I sure can't find any info online. Otherwise, any suggestions as to how I could get around cloning the entire project_a repo? I might be totally off here, but one thing I was wondering is if there might be some way that I could have project_b trigger a specific pipeline for project_a that only does what I need it to do to test project_b?

Any advice would be appreciated, thanks!

Upvotes: 3

Views: 6145

Answers (1)

William Edmisten
William Edmisten

Reputation: 753

Gitlab CI/CD multi-project pipelines have no intrinsic notions of upstream and downstream, so you can make a pipeline that triggers another pipeline just by referencing the project name in the trigger keyword:

# inside project B .gitlab-ci.yml

# this stage will trigger project A pipeline to run
merge_requests:
  stage: test
  trigger: my/project_a

You can also use the rules keyword to run specific stages in the downstream pipeline.

# in project A .gitlab-ci.yml

# this will never run when triggered by project B
merge_requests:
  stage: test
  script: echo "test some things"
  rules:
    - if: '$CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE == "trigger"'
      when: never

# this stage will always run when triggered by project B
merge_request_downstream:
  stage: test
  rules:
    - if: '$CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE == "trigger"'
  script: echo "test some specific project B things"

So you can put your project B specific tests in the script for merge_request_downstream. Hopefully that answers your question. I'm not quite sure that's better than just cloning project A in your project B script, but this is how you would accomplish it with multi-project pipelines.

Upvotes: 5

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