Rules and Conditional Jobs

Part of the GitLab CI course

Every job you have written so far runs on every single push, no matter which branch it landed on or why the pipeline started. That is harmless while you are experimenting alone, but it stops being harmless the moment a real team is pushing to a real project. Nobody wants a thirty minute integration suite kicking off because someone fixed a typo in the README.

Think of a rules: block as a series of yes-or-no questions asked in a fixed order, like a form that says "if you answered yes to question 1, stop here and follow its instructions, otherwise move to question 2." A rule in GitLab CI is exactly one entry in that list, and GitLab walks the list from the top, checking each rule in turn, and stops at the very first one that matches. ...