Testing Gitlab Templates Merge Requests¶

Specifying a Merge Request via form variables¶

If a project wants to test using a branch/MR of this repository, go to your project's CI/CD settings page and add the variables below. All pipelines in the project will use the specified repository+branch until the variables are removed.

KEY = _GITLAB_TEMPLATES_REPO VALUE = issue/gitlab_templates-nnnnnnn
KEY = _GITLAB_TEMPLATES_REF VALUE = branch name, often the format is nnnnnnn-some-text

The variables should have the following attributes:

Type = Variable (default)
Environment Scope = All (default)
Protected = No
Masked = No
Expanded = Yes

This method of testing will only work if you have the unchanged default settings for project and ref in your .gitlab-ci.yml, as shown here:

  - project: $_GITLAB_TEMPLATES_REPO
    ref: $_GITLAB_TEMPLATES_REF

Specifying a Merge Request in the .gitlab-ci.yml file¶

You can also test a Merge Request by changing these two lines in your .gitlab-ci.yml file:

  - project: $_GITLAB_TEMPLATES_REPO
    ref: $_GITLAB_TEMPLATES_REF

to

  - project: issue/gitlab_templates-12345
    ref: 12345-branch-name

where project is set to the fork name (issue/gitlab_templates-12345) and ref is set to the branch name (12345-branch-name).

If the MR is testing assets provided by the fork (like modifications to .cspell.json, phpcs.xml.dist or symlink_project.php), you wil also need to set two additional variables _CURL_TEMPLATES_REPO and _CURL_TEMPLATES_REF to match the project and ref values:

variables:
  _CURL_TEMPLATES_REPO: issue/gitlab_templates-12345
  _CURL_TEMPLATES_REF: 12345-branch-name

If you have made these temporary changes and then you also want to start a manual pipeline via the UI, you will need to delete the two input variables _GITLAB_TEMPLATES_REPO and _GITLAB_TEMPLATES_REF from the form. This is because the form values take precedence over variables coded in the .gitlab-ci.yml file.