[CI] Pipeline fails when there are no jobs to be executed

Summary

I'm trying to configure the GitLab CI to run pipelines only for the master branch (i.e. exclude all other branches) until issue #23902 (moved) by @ayufan gets resolved. There is only 1 job in .gitlab-ci.yml and I'm using only to make the pipeline run only for the master branch. However this makes the pipeline fail because there are no jobs (which is expected when running in a branch different from master).

Steps to reproduce

1. Create .gitlab-ci.yml file with only one job.
2. Add only to limit the execution only when the condition is met (e.g. only for the master branch):

only:
        - master

1. Trigger the pipeline while making sure that the condition is not met (e.g. in a branch different from master).

What is the current bug behavior?

The pipeline fails.

What is the expected correct behavior?

The pipeline should not fail when there are no jobs to be executed - it should be just skipped.

Relevant logs and/or screenshots

Output of checks

This bug happens on GitLab.com

changed title from Pipeline fails when there are no jobs to be executed to [CI] Pipeline fails when there are no jobs to be executed

changed the description

@ignat-ai Thanks for raising an issue. Please could you create an example project here on GitLab.com that exhibits the problematic behaviour?

I tried to reproduce in the following example project, but a pipeline wasn't created for pushes to branches other than master:

• https://gitlab.com/issue-reproduce/pipeline-branch-restrict/

added ~19173 ~65372 pipeline ~532786 labels

@markglenfletcher Thanks for looking into this. Actually I don't have any jobs, i.e. the configuration settings are at a top-level. I updated the .gitlab-ci.yml to resemble my configuration and made a merge request that caused the pipeline to fail. I'm not sure if the problem is not in my configuration, because I'm pretty new to GitLab CI, but from examples I saw elsewhere I expect that it should work this way too (i.e. without explicit jobs). Let me know if you need more details.

@ignat-ai Thanks for the update. This view shows a validation error when processing the .gitlab-ci.yml file for that patch-1 branch:

• https://gitlab.com/ignat-ai/pipeline-branch-restrict/commit/9f07071fc295759d90d2a6f6d72efe4f76edfe43/pipelines

script parameter is only available within a specified job:

job1:
  script: 
    - echo "Running..."

See:

• https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/ci/yaml/#script

The same is the case for only:

• https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/ci/yaml/#only-and-except

So you'll need to define jobs like in my example for this to work

closed

Ah, I see now, thanks for the clarification! I thought that job is some special keyword. Actually I have a job then - build in the commented out lines inside the updated .gitlab-ci.yml. This means that I have to move the only condition under it, i.e. it's not a bug but an error in my configuration. Actually my intent is to disable the whole pipeline for branches different than master so it's a bit counter-intuitive that it's not possible to do it at a global level.

Then I guess that the real problem is that it's not clear why the build actually failed (i.e. invalid .gitlab-ci.yml) as already stated in #28155 (moved). I couldn't expect that the reason for the pipeline failure could be found in the Jobs tab, because the counter was 0, i.e. I wouldn't expect to find anything there. IMHO this definitely should be visible inside the pipeline status page.

On a side-note, it would be great to add the ability to skip the execution of the CI pipeline by using git push options (opposed to commit message tags) as proposed in the following comment which would allow for additional and more dynamic control of the CI.