Is the .gitlab-ci.yml available for jobs with GIT_STRATEGY=none in Gitlab CI?

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The Gitlab documentation says the following about GIT_STRATEGY: none:

none also re-uses the project workspace, but skips all Git operations (including GitLab Runner's pre-clone script, if present). It is mostly useful for jobs that operate exclusively on artifacts (e.g., deploy). Git repository data may be present, but it is certain to be out of date, so you should only rely on files brought into the project workspace from cache or artifacts.

I'm still a bit confused about how this is supposed to work. If the source code is not guaranteed to exist, then there might be no source in the project workspace and thus the .gitlab-ci.yml file would also be missing. Without a build script the job must fail. If the source is missing only part of the time depending on external factors, the job will fail randomly, which is even worse than failing every time. However, if it fails every single time then what's the point of the feature?

Another possibility I see is that .gitlab-ci.yml might be injected at runtime, so that even without a fresh copy of the repository there would be a build script. If so, could I define further files from my repository to inject into the build process? What are the restrictions on these particular jobs?

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1 Answers

Yes, the .gitlab-ci.yml file is not copied onto the system just like all the other files. But that doesn't matter as the job is not run from the file. The job is run as a script on your target (and even before that as it defines the target it will run on). It is not possible to copy only selected files without a git clone although you may want to copy the files from some other server.

A good example of when you want to run GIT_STRATEGY: none are things like slackchat notifications as last stage of a build when you really don't want to clone gigabytes of repository data just to push a notification.

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