Pattern Matching for rules parameter Gitlab CI

Question

I am trying to make use of the rules: parameter to make a job only appear in a pipeline if specified users did the push. I dont want to define the list of users for each job, so I have the following global variable:

variables:
  USER_LIST: "user1 user2 user3"

and in the job, I have the following:

rules:
 - if '$USER_LIST =~ /$GITLAB_USER_LOGIN/'
    when: on_success
 - when: never

This does not appear to be working, as I suspect the regex pattern being used is not being replaced by the variable, and using $GITLAB_USER_LOGIN as the search string. If I use an explicit search:

rules:
 - if '$USER_LIST =~ /user1/'
    when: on_success
 - when: never

then the pattern matches just fine.

NOTE: I am aware that GITLAB_USER_LOGIN is a protected variable. I get the same problem with GITLAB_USER_EMAIL too.

So the question is, how can I put a GITLAB predifined variable into a string that will be used for pattern matching?

Answer 1

We can't use variables inside pattern for some (gitlab) reason. But we can swap list of privileged users and the current user in rule. Just transform list of users to regexp pattern:

.job:
    variables: 
        PRIVILEGED_USERS_PATTERN: '/user1|user2|userN/i'
    rules:
        - if: $GITLAB_USER_LOGIN =~ $PRIVILEGED_USERS_PATTERN
          when: manual

This solution has two minuses:

1. List of privileged users visible to all, who have reading access to the project

2. Pattern length limit (no testing)

But for now i don't see other solution how to not running the job at all.

Answer 2

You are using a variable and not a regular expression in your rule. So you don't need the slashes around the $GITLAB_USER_LOGIN variable. Try something like this:

rules:
  - if '$USER_LIST =~ $GITLAB_USER_LOGIN'