Run your pipeline only when needed

Posted on Views:

You don’t need to run your blog publication pipeline for every update.

Once I had set up my publication workflow, it was (obviously) getting triggered every time I pushed to GitLab. This included, for example, every time I updated a draft post – which makes no sense as this draft will not appear on the published blog. Fortunately, it is easy to set additional conditions in the .gitlab-ci.yml file to fine-tune when the pipeline should run.

The relevant section of the GitLab documentation is under Rules and in my case, I have the following snippet at the mottom of the CI/CD definition.

.gitlab-ci.yml extract
1
2
3
4
5
6
rules:
  - if: $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == $CI_DEFAULT_BRANCH
    changes:
      - source/_posts/*
      - source/about/*.md
      - "*.yml"

This will trigger the pipeline for

  • any changes in a post,
  • changes in the yml files in the root directory, which are generally configuration files (note you need to surround root-level wildcards in double quotes), and/or
  • changes in my about page.

If I add additional static pages, I would need to add them to that list.