GitLab CI variables in job api?

Question

I am using rest API to run manual jobs in GitLab CI. When i start a manual job from UI I am able to define custom variables that i can use during the job. How can i define them when running job through API?

Could not find any documentation on it. Or not even a single question in forums.

This is how i currently run my job

curl -k --request POST --header "PRIVATE-TOKEN: abc" https://mygit.com/api/v4/projects/17/jobs/1956/play

I tried adding:

--form variables[TEST]=hello

But this didnt work.

Edit: A bit more information on what im doing. So my pipeline has two stages. Build and deploy. On each commit I want build to run once and then i want to be able to deploy this result to multiple different servers. Because the server list is dynamic and there are a lot of them I want to have the IP address of the server as an variable I can give to my deploy job.

Answer 1

Instead of starting a job you can start a pipeline and set the variables from there. Here's an example of how to do this from the GitLab documentation:

curl --request POST --header "PRIVATE-TOKEN: <your_access_token>" \
--header "Content-Type: application/json" \
--data '{ "ref": "master", "variables": [ {"key": "VAR1", "value": "hello"}, {"key": "VAR2", "value": "world"} ] }' \
"https://gitlab.example.com/api/v4/projects/169/pipeline"