Recently, due to adjustments in our company’s container cloud environment, I needed to adapt previously stable CI/CD configuration files to the new runtime environment. After modifying the CI/CD configuration file, I confidently executed git push. Of course, it didn’t pass, otherwise this article wouldn’t exist…

Since everything had been running stably before, I hadn’t enabled verbose mode during deployment. As a result, I couldn’t determine the specific reason for the CI/CD execution failure. I didn’t want to keep verbose mode enabled all the time, so I looked through Gitlab’s documentation to see if I could control whether to enable verbose mode through environment variables.

This search indeed led me to a viable solution, along with other discoveries.

Push option⌗

This feature is provided by Git, allowing you to attach user-defined Push options when executing the git push command. In Gitlab’s documentation, I discovered that this feature can be used to skip CI/CD. Why would you want to do this? For instance, when we’re frequently debugging, we might not want every Push to trigger CI/CD. In that case, we can use the following command to skip the CI/CD pipeline:

git push -o ci.skip

ci.skip is a predefined option in Gitlab. For more options, see Gitlab’s official documentation.

Using custom variables⌗

Since Gitlab can receive Git Push option values, I had a bold idea: could we control whether to enable verbose mode through custom environment variables?

So I added the following configuration to the project’s .gitlab-ci.yml file:

stages:
  - deploy
variables:
  VERBOSE: "" # The default value here is an empty string

deploy:preview:
  image: betterde/deployer:6.8.0
  only:
    refs:
      - develop
  stage: deploy
  tags:
    - DevOps
  script:
    - deployer deploy preview $VERBOSE

VERBOSE is what we use to receive the -vvv parameter. Note that in the configuration file, we set this variable to an empty string value, and in the script block, we directly use $VERBOSE to get the environment variable value (don’t wrap it in double quotes, otherwise it will be recognized as a parameter even if it’s empty).

We only need to execute the following command to control whether to enable verbose mode:

# Default: not enabled
git push

# When debugging requires enabling it
git push -o ci.variable="VERBOSE=-vvv"

# If you need to pass multiple parameters:
git push -o ci.variable="ONE=1" -o ci.variable="TWO=2"

At this point, we’ve achieved more fine-grained control over CI/CD, so let those freed-up hands do more meaningful things!

I hope this is helpful, Happy hacking…