What is the 'retry' keyword and how do you handle flaky tests in GitLab CI?

The retry keyword automatically reruns a job when it fails, up to the specified number of times. This is useful for handling transient failures - network timeouts, flaky tests, or race conditions - without manual intervention.

# Simple retry: retry up to 2 times on any failure
flaky-test:
  script:
    - run-tests.sh
  retry: 2                     # total: 3 attempts (1 original + 2 retries)

# Retry only on specific failure types:
network-test:
  script:
    - curl https://api.example.com/data
  retry:
    max: 2
    when:
      - runner_system_failure   # runner itself crashed
      - stuck_or_timeout_failure  # job timed out
      - api_failure             # GitLab API error during job
      # NOT for script failures (that would mask real test failures)

# All retry "when" values:
# always, unknown_failure, script_failure, api_failure,
# runner_system_failure, missing_dependency_failure,
# stuck_or_timeout_failure, scheduler_failure, data_integrity_failure

Best practice: avoid retry: always or retrying on script_failure - these can hide real failures. Only retry on infrastructure failures (runner_system_failure, stuck_or_timeout_failure) where the failure is clearly not the code's fault.

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