Pipeline-trigger allows you to trigger and wait for the results of another GitLab pipeline.
GitLab's pipelines are a great tool to set up a CI process within projects. There's a relatively straight-forward way of triggering another project's pipeline from a parent project.
However, this process is "fire and forget": you will trigger the project with an HTTP request but this call will return upon registering the trigger on the other end and not wait for that pipeline to finish, let alone tell you how it went.
For instance, imagine you want to set up the following pipeline with a parent project triggering builds in other projects - A and B - and waiting for their results:
This is impossible to configure out of the box with GitLab.
However, thanks to the GitLab API and docker, it's actually quite simple to set up a reusable docker image which can be used as a building block.
Here's what the .gitlab-ci.yml looks like for the above pipeline (straight from on older version of this project's gitlab-ci.yml):
variables:
IMAGE: $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:$CI_COMMIT_SHA
# set via secret variables
API_TOKEN: $PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN
PROJ_A_ID: $PROJ_A_ID
PROJ_A_PIPELINE_TOKEN: "$PROJ_A_PIPELINE_TOKEN"
PROJ_B_ID: $PROJ_B_ID
PROJ_B_PIPELINE_TOKEN: $PROJ_B_PIPELINE_TOKEN
TARGET_BRANCH: master
stages:
- build
- test
- release
build-sha:
# details skipped
test proj a:
stage: test
image: $IMAGE
script:
- trigger -a "$API_TOKEN" -p "$PROJ_A_PIPELINE_TOKEN" -t $TARGET_BRANCH $PROJ_A_ID
test proj b:
stage: test
image: $IMAGE
script:
- trigger -a "$API_TOKEN" -p "$PROJ_B_PIPELINE_TOKEN" -t $TARGET_BRANCH $PROJ_B_ID
release-tag:
# details skipped
Apart from configuring the typical variables needed, the essential part is to set up a trigger job for each dependency:
test proj a:
stage: test_dev
image: $PTRIGGER
script:
- trigger -a "$API_TOKEN" -p "$PROJ_A_PIPELINE_TOKEN" -t $TARGET_BRANCH $PROJ_A_ID
This runs the trigger command which is part of the pipeline-trigger image with the specified parameters. This script will trigger the pipeline in the given project and then poll the pipeline status for its result. The exit code will be 0 in case of success and that way integate in your parent project's pipeline like any other build job - just that it's run on another project's pipeline.
GitLab pipeline triggers accept variables being passed along with the trigger command. In the curl version these are constructed as follows:
curl ... -F variables[foo]=bar ...
pipeline-trigger supports this as well via the -e switch (e for environment variable):
trigger ... -e foo=bar
Sometimes the remote pipeline triggered via pipeline-trigger is complex and/or consists of long-running steps. Because pipeline-trigger by default simply triggers a new remote pipeline (like you would in the pipeline UI), having to re-run a full pipeline just because one stage failed can be annoying.
Starting with pipeline-trigger 2.0.0 it is possible to retry the remote pipeline via the --retry (or -r) parameter.
Pipeline-trigger will look for the last pipeline that has been run for the given ref and inspect its status. If the pipeline was successful, it will create a new pipeline for the ref. If it had another status it will retry the pipeline.
The reason -r will create a new pipeline successful pipelines is to allow you to configure your pipelines with -r in general. If pipeline-trigger did not create new pipelines in case of success you would not be able to trigger further pipelines once a ref's pipeline has succeeded.
Starting with pipeline-trigger 2.1.0 you can also pass in a pipeline id to be retried specifically using the --pid parameter. This is useful if you have kept ids around for retries and want to avoid having pipeline-trigger perform lookups. Note that --pid implies -r.
Other than using the provided pipeline id instead of looking up the latest pipeline for a given reference, pipeline-trigger behaves the same as for retries without the --pid parameter. Notably, if the pipeline for the given pipeline id was already in success state, a new pipeline will be created.
If you're self-hosting gitlab on your own domain, you will need to configure the urls being used for the API calls. You can use the -h and -u flags for this as follows:
trigger -h gitlab.com -u /api/v4/projects ...
where gitlab.com and /api/v4/projects are also the default values used.
If you're self-hosting gitlab use a SelfSigned SSL certificate you can use the -v flag as follows:
trigger -h gitlab.com -u /api/v4/projects -v false ...
Typically you will only need to override the host but -u to change the url path is there if you need it.
Pipelines with manual stages are taken as allow_failure = true by default in Gitlab. When triggered by pipeline-trigger, these pipelines will be read as passed but will not play their action and therefore the progress of the remote pipeline will stop at the manual stage.
By passing the flag --on-manual play, remote pipelines' actions will be played by pipeline-trigger. Please note that this flag will apply to all manual stages. You cannot play only certain manual stages at this time.
If the manual pipeline is configured as allow_failure = false but you want to treat it as passed when triggering it without playing the action, use the flag --on-manual pass.