Gitlab CI ist not skipping a step if pipeline is triggered from the UI with varibles

Question

I have the following gitlab pipeline:

stages:
  - argocd-delete
  - argocd-update

update-custom-argocd-with-new-group:
  stage: argocd-update
  image: alpine:latest
  before_script: ...
  script: ...
  rules:
    - changes:
      - manifests/customer-resources/*
    - when: never

delete-users-from-argocd:
  stage: argocd-delete
  image: alpine:latest
  variables:
    CUSTOMER_NAME: ""
    GROUP_NAME: ""
  before_script: ...
  script: ...
  rules:
    - if: '$CUSTOMER_NAME!="" && $GROUP_NAME!=""'
      when: always 
    - when: never

In case if I commit and there are changes in customer-resources/ job "update-custom-argocd-with-new-group" runs and if there are no changes it is skipped. All as expected. But if I trigger pipeline from Gitlab interface with CUSTOMER_NAME and GROUP_NAME varibles, to trigger "delete-users-from-argocd" job, then the other job is also executed. I do not understend why and how can I force to skip it?

Answer 1

You can add a new rule to force skip it:

update-custom-argocd-with-new-group:
  stage: argocd-update
  image: alpine:latest
  before_script: ...
  script: ...
  rules:
    - changes:
      - manifests/customer-resources/*
    - if: $CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE == 'web'
      when: never
    - when: never

As for why it triggers when you run it from the UI, which branch are you selecting? If you are in a working branch, the compare_to will diff your branch with main. This could make the pipeline think there were changes to the files and triggering the job.