DevOps / GitLab CI Basics Interview Questions
What are 'rules' in GitLab CI/CD and how do they control when jobs run?
The rules keyword lets you add conditions that determine whether a job is included in a pipeline, skipped, or made manual. Rules are evaluated in order - the first matching rule applies and the rest are ignored.
deploy-prod: stage: deploy script: - ./deploy.sh production rules: - if: $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == "main" # only run on main branch when: on_success # (default) run if prior stages passed - if: $CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE == "schedule" when: on_success - when: never # never run for any other condition # Common rules patterns: job-on-mr: rules: - if: $CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE == "merge_request_event" job-on-tag: rules: - if: $CI_COMMIT_TAG # runs when a git tag is pushed job-manual-on-prod: rules: - if: $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == "main" when: manual # must be manually triggered in UI job-with-changes: rules: - changes: # only run if these files changed - src/**/* - package.json job-allow-fail: rules: - if: $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == "main" allow_failure: true # pipeline passes even if this fails
| Value | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| on_success (default) | Run if all prior jobs in pipeline passed |
| on_failure | Run only if a prior job failed |
| always | Run regardless of prior job status |
| never | Never add this job to the pipeline |
| manual | Add job but require manual trigger to start |
| delayed | Run after a specified delay |
In GitLab CI rules, what happens when multiple rules conditions are defined?
What does 'when: manual' in a rules block do?
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