Artifacts and Caches

Part of the GitLab CI course

Every job in a pipeline starts from a clean checkout of your repository and runs inside a throwaway environment that is thrown away the instant the job finishes. That is a deliberate design, it is what keeps one job from silently depending on leftover state from another, but it raises an obvious question: if a job compiles a binary, or produces a test report, or downloads a folder of dependencies that took two...

Imagine a factory line where every station is wiped clean the moment its worker clocks out, materials and all, unless someone specifically boxes something up and hands it to the next station first. That is what a GitLab job's filesystem is like. A build job might run for two minutes, compile a program, and write it to a dist/ folder, but the instant that job's script finishes, its entire environment, dist/ included,...