Skipping the GitLab CI

GitLab CI is a pretty nifty tool to run your CI pipelines using Docker. At times, you may want to skip it, though, e.g., when you update a README or LICENSE. There are multiple ways to do that.

Skipping files

You can skip the CI for some files using the wildcards and except.changes key in the .gitlab-ci.yml file, e.g., the following configuration will skip the CI when changes are made to a markdown or .gitignore file.

yaml

1build:
2  script: ./gradlew --build-cache assemble
3  except:
4    changes:
5      - "*.md"
6      - ".gitignore"

Skipping a commit

You can skip the CI for a commit by adding [ci skip] or [skip ci] in the commit message. In case you forget to do that, you can pass the ci.skip option while pushing your changes.

git push -o ci.skip

Note that this works only for Git 2.10 and onwards.