How to have a gitlab CI job to be triggred only manual on branches and always automatically on master?

Question

I have a pages job that I want to run manual on branches, but automatically triggered on master:

pages:
  stage: deploy
  cache:
    paths:
      - public
  script:
    - scripts/pages.sh
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - public
    expire_in: 2 days

So I want a combination of:

  only:
    - master
  when: always

  only:
    - branches
  except:
    - master
  when: manual

Is that possible?

Answer 1

This should be possible to do if you use GitLab CI rules. This is an example where the shell is powershell and it shows the current time and branch/tag name:

pages:
  script:
    - mkdir public
    - date > public\index.html
    - $CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME >> public\index.html
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - public
  rules:
    - if: '$CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == "master"'
      when: always
    - if: '$CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == null'
      when: never
    - when: manual

GitLab matches each individual rule from top to bottom. If the branch is named 'master', the job gets marked with when: always. If the branch name is null, this is a tag, and the job is marked with never. If this is not a branch named master, nor a tag, this is a normal branch, and the job is marked with manual.

As Aleksey Tsalolikhin described, you can remove this rule:

    - if: '$CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == null'
      when: never

You will then get the option to run the pipeline for your tags as well, like this:

If this is what you want or not, that is up to you.

Answer 2

I've tweaked the answer by MrBerta -- the third command was missing the echo command.

I also changed the slashes from backslashes to regular forward slashes so I can use the Linux shell rather than Powershell.

It now works.

Here is the gitlab-ci.yml file -- with credit to MrBerta.

pages:
  script:
    - mkdir public
    - date > public/index.html
    - echo $CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME >> public/index.html
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - public
  rules:
    - if: '$CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == "master"'
      when: always
    - if: '$CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == null'
      when: never
    - when: manual

I tried pushing to master, and my GitLab Pages content was updated as expected; and I tried pushing to a feature branch, and the manual "Play" button came up in the CI/CD pipeline UI.

When I pushed a tag (with detached head, i.e., not on any branch), I could not test it -- GitLab CI did not run a pipeline automatically, and when I tried to Run Pipeline, and picked my tag, GitLab threw an error: "The form contains the following error: No stages / jobs for this pipeline."

So, I would simplify this to:

pages:
  script:
    - mkdir public
    - date > public/index.html
    - echo $CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME >> public/index.html
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - public
  rules:
    - if: '$CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == "master"'
      when: always
    - when: manual

This pages job runs manually on branches (and tags but I couldn't test it), but automatically triggered on master, as the original poster requested.