TIL: Gitlab CI: The needs Keyword

Gitlab CI has the needs keyword since 2021. It allows building stageless pipelines, but has many uses.

Example (before)

Sometimes we run different test suites in parallel (e.g. unit-tests and integration tests), but want aggregated coverage results. This results in a pipeline like this:

It would be nicer, if we had a single stage called “test” that contains all of theses jobs.

Example (after)

Using needs, our .gitlab-ci.yml looks like this:

service-tests-unit:
  ...

service-tests-integration:
  ...

coverage:
  stage: test
  needs:
    - job: service-tests-unit
    - job: service-tests-integration

This results in a single stage, where coverage depends on tests:

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