Make runner jobs with another job

You can make gitlab runner jobs with another job.

That means we can define jobs like a function in programming.

It's cool function, when we have very similar jobs repeatedly

Here's some examples.

When we have many servers to deploy, we wrote .gitlab-ci.yml file like this.

deploy1:

    script:

        # send local files to remote server

        - rsync -artlp --ignore-existing --exclude-from='.rsyncignore' ./ "$USER"@"$SERVER1":"$RSYNC_TO_PATH"

deploy2:

    script:

        # send local files to remote server

        - rsync -artlp --ignore-existing --exclude-from='.rsyncignore' ./ "$USER"@"$SERVER2":"$RSYNC_TO_PATH"

We can change upper setting jobs like below.

.deploy_script: &deploy_script

script:

            # send local files to remote server

        - rsync -artlp --ignore-existing --exclude-from='.rsyncignore' ./ "$USER"@"$SERVER":"$RSYNC_TO_PATH"

deploy1:

<<: *deploy_script

variables:

USER: user_id

SERVER: 10.10.10.10

RSYNC_TO_PATH: /var/www

deploy2:

<<: *deploy_script

variables:

USER: user_id

SERVER: 10.10.10.11

RSYNC_TO_PATH: /var/www

This settings make more efficient when we have many similar jobs.

Define functional jobs 'deploy_script', and use this job on another jobs.