Gitlab-CI: conditional allow_failure

Question

I recently started implementing automatic tests for my code, and I noticed that the CI does not catch the warnings of the compiler - the tests are shown as successful even when there are warnings. I have initially added a flag for the compiler to turn the warnings into errors and allow_failure=True, but the problem is that the compiler stops in the first warning->error and does not go through the entire compilation. I then used the trick explained here to write the warnings into a file, and then test if the file is not zero:

    - make 2> >(tee make.warnings)
    - test ! -s make.warnings

After the whole compilation is done, this will give an error if there are warnings written to the file - and using allow_failure=True, this works for the cases where I have no errors/warnings, but also when I have warnings. However, if I have real errors, this will also be shown as a warning in CI, and will not stop the pipeline because of the allow_failure=True.

I could not find a way to allow_failure=True depending on something run in the script (without creating a new stage) or using some condition (i.e., if the file is empty or not). Is there a simple way to do this that I'm missing?

VonC_6309 · Answer

Since there is no condition per se, check out GitLab 13.8 (January 2021):

Control job status using exit codes

You can use the allow_failure keyword to prevent failed jobs from causing an entire pipeline to fail.

Previously, allow_failure only accepted boolean values of true or false but we’ve made improvements in this release.

Now you can use the allow_failure keyword to look for specific script exit codes.

This gives you more flexibility and control over your pipelines, preventing failures based on the exit codes.

See Documentation and Issue.

If you can use as condition an exit status of a script, that would be enough for allow_failure to be more specific.

Gitlab-CI: conditional allow_failure

1 Answers

Control job status using exit codes