What is the limit number of GitLab CI/CD variables?

Question

I am planning to store some of the key/values inside GitLab CI/CD variables? I found in the document that each value is limited to 1000 characters. I am wondering if there is any limitation for the number of keys/values as well?

Answer 1

You can now see all limits for CI/CD with See GitLab 15.0 (May 2022):

Show instance CI/CD limits in /help

Instance Administrators can set a number of CI/CD limits in the Admin Area of their instance. It is hard for users without administrator access to know what the limits are, especially when pipelines are failing because they bump into limits they didn’t know existed.

Now the CI/CD related limits for the instance can be seen on the instance configuration page found at /help/instance_configuration.
Thanks to @wwwjon for this contribution!

See Documentation and Issue.

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GitLab 15.7 (Dec. 2022) brings a precise answer:

Limit the number of project or group CI/CD variables to 200

If your instance has project or group maintainers adding too many CI/CD variables, it could use a lot of resources to process all the variables for each pipeline.

To ensure your pipelines continue to run efficiently, we have added a limit of 200 variables per group or project.

Projects and groups that already have over 200 CI/CD variables can continue to run pipelines as before, but will not be able to add any more variables.

We recommend reducing the number of CI/CD variables down to less than 200 per group or project for optimal performance.

See Documentation and Issue.

Answer 2

It would be 25 according to the default plan but you can change it. Hope that answers your question!

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/administration/instance_limits.html#number-of-instance-level-variables

Well, I see now that Tolis already clarified it but I will still post this :)

Answer 3

For the default plan the limit of variables in self hosted instance would be 25 according to https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/administration/instance_limits.html#number-of-instance-level-variables

But it states that you can update this number