What is the 'needs' keyword in GitLab CI/CD and what problem does it solve?

The needs keyword creates a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of job dependencies, allowing jobs to start as soon as their specific dependencies are complete - rather than waiting for the entire previous stage to finish. This reduces total pipeline time significantly.

stages:
  - build
  - test
  - deploy

build-frontend:
  stage: build
  script: npm run build
  artifacts:
    paths: [dist/]

build-backend:
  stage: build
  script: go build -o api ./cmd
  artifacts:
    paths: [api]

# Without needs: test-frontend must wait for BOTH build jobs to finish
# With needs: test-frontend starts as soon as build-frontend is done
test-frontend:
  stage: test
  needs:
    - build-frontend      # only waits for this specific job
  script: npm test

test-backend:
  stage: test
  needs:
    - build-backend       # only waits for this specific job
  script: go test ./...

deploy:
  stage: deploy
  needs:
    - test-frontend
    - test-backend
  script: ./deploy.sh

Key behaviours with needs:

• Jobs with needs can run out of stage order - needs overrides stage sequencing
• A job with needs: [] (empty list) starts immediately when the pipeline creates
• By default, a job with needs downloads artifacts from the listed jobs
• Set artifacts: false in needs to skip downloading artifacts

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