Retrieving a CI variable outside the CI file in GitLab

Question

I want to retrieve and use the project information using the predefined variables in GitLab such as CI_COMMIT_AUTHOR.

I want to use that variable outside of the.gitlab-ci.yml file.

I am writing a template so when it's used the file should repopulate with the correct information.

For example, the template includes a.yaml file

apiVersion: sample.io/v1alpha1
kind: Component
metadata:
  name: #said team app"my_awesome_app"
  description: #description of app
  annotations:
    backstage.io/techdocs-ref: dir:.
spec:
  type: documentation
  lifecycle: experimental
  owner: $CI_COMMIT_AUTHOR

Answer 1

If you want to use Gitlab variables outside the.gitlab-ci.yml, the way to achieve this is to query them through the Gitlab API

But unfortunately, for the Gitlab predefined variables it seems that an API to retrieve them doesn't exist

My proposal would be to create a file with all the variables you require, in your gitlab-ci.yml. Store it the artifacts and retrieve the artifacts through Gitlab API

To achieve this firstly add a job to your gitlab yml, that stores the predefined variables in an artifact Eg

store_predefined_variables:
  ...
  script:
    - touch variables.txt
    - echo "CI_COMMIT_AUTHOR=$CI_COMMIT_AUTHOR" >> variables.txt
  artifacts:
     paths:
       - ./variables.txt

Next retrieve the id of the job with name store_predefined_variables https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/api/jobs.html#list-project-jobs

GET /projects/:id/jobs

Finally, use the job id to retrieve the artifacts that contain all the needed variables https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/api/job_artifacts.html#get-job-artifacts

GET /projects/:id/jobs/:job_id/artifacts

Combining the two API calls abd utilizing the jq command, we can get a one liner that retrieves the artifacts of the most recent job with name store_predefined_variables . The artifacts are download as artifacts.zip

wget -U "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.17 (KHTML,like Gecko) Ubuntu/11.04 Chromium/11.0.654.0 Chrome/11.0.654.0 Safari/534.17" --header "PRIVATE-TOKEN: <access_token>" "https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/<project_id>/jobs/$(curl -s  --header "PRIVATE-TOKEN: <access_token>" "https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/<project_id>/jobs" | jq '[.[] | select(.name=="store_predefined_variables")] | .[0].id')/artifacts" -O artifacts.zip