Cloud Native CI/CD with GitLab

Choosing When to Download Artifacts

Let's simplify the DAG example above and imagine we have 3 jobs: job_1, job_2, and job_3.

• job_2 and job_3 depend on job_1.
• The second job, job_2, needs the artifacts generated by job_1, but job_3 does not.

Here is how you can manage this:

job_1:
  script:
    - echo "This is job 1"
    - echo "some data" > artifact1.txt
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - artifact1.txt

job_2:
  needs:
    - job: job_1
  script:
    - echo "This is job 2"
    - cat artifact1.txt

job_3:
  needs:
    - job: job_1
  script:
    - echo "This is job 3"

There is no problem with our pipeline, however, we are downloading the artifact1.txt file in the job_3 job, even though it is not needed. This can be time-consuming if the artifact is large. To avoid this, you can add artifacts: false to the job_3 job. This way, the artifact will not be downloaded even though it is generated by job_1. Here is how you can achieve this:

job_3:
  needs:    
    -