How is Gitlab's "project workspace" defined and propagated between jobs?

Question

Gitlab's documentation often mentions a "project workspace" without actually defining its construction and functionality. One example is from the chapter about Git strategy which just plain tells the user "Using git fetch which is faster as it re-uses the project workspace (falling back to clone if it doesn't exist)." and doesn't define the way of reusage in any way.

I would like to understand how it's created, how it's tranferred between jobs and how this impacts jobs running in a Docker executor. Is there some kind of information about this apart from the source code? Have I missed some crucial part of the documentation?

Answer 1

There is no concept of a GitLab-specific workspace as far as I know. Perhaps it might be worth suggesting a change in that documentation page (everyone can submit a merge request using the links at the bottom of each docs page).

I would say workspace in that concepts simply refers to either the parent directory under which you clone a Git repository, or the repository's own directory. This other document provides some more context.