Pipeline Schedules

Notes: - This feature was introduced in 9.1 as Trigger Schedule. - In 9.2, the feature was renamed to Pipeline Schedule. - Cron notation is parsed by Rufus-Scheduler.

Pipeline schedules can be used to run a pipeline at specific intervals, for example every month on the 22nd for a certain branch.

Using Pipeline schedules

In order to schedule a pipeline:

  1. Navigate to your project’s CI / CD ➔ Schedules and click the New Schedule button.
  2. Fill in the form
  3. Hit Save pipeline schedule for the changes to take effect.

New Schedule Form

Attention: The pipelines won’t be executed precisely, because schedules are handled by Sidekiq, which runs according to its interval. See advanced admin configuration for more information.

In the Schedules index page you can see a list of the pipelines that are scheduled to run. The next run is automatically calculated by the server GitLab is installed on.

Schedules list

Running a scheduled pipeline manually

Introduced in GitLab 10.4.

To trigger a pipeline schedule manually, click the “Play” button:

Play Pipeline Schedule

This will schedule a background job to run the pipeline schedule. A flash message will provide a link to the CI/CD Pipeline index page.

To help avoid abuse, users are rate limited to triggering a pipeline once per minute.

Making use of scheduled pipeline variables

Introduced in GitLab 9.4.

You can pass any number of arbitrary variables and they will be available in GitLab CI so that they can be used in your .gitlab-ci.yml file.

Scheduled pipeline variables

Using only and except

To configure that a job can be executed only when the pipeline has been scheduled (or the opposite), you can use only and except configuration keywords.

job:on-schedule:
  only:
    - schedules
  script:
    - make world

job:
  except:
    - schedules
  script:
    - make build

Taking ownership

Pipelines are executed as a user, who owns a schedule. This influences what projects and other resources the pipeline has access to. If a user does not own a pipeline, you can take ownership by clicking the Take ownership button. The next time a pipeline is scheduled, your credentials will be used.

Schedules list

Note: If the owner of a pipeline schedule doesn’t have the ability to create pipelines on the target branch, the schedule will stop creating new pipelines. This can happen if, for example, the owner is blocked or removed from the project, or the target branch or tag is protected. In this case, someone with sufficient privileges must take ownership of the schedule.

Advanced admin configuration

The pipelines won’t be executed precisely, because schedules are handled by Sidekiq, which runs according to its interval. For example, if you set a schedule to create a pipeline every minute (* * * * *) and the Sidekiq worker runs on 00:00 and 12:00 every day (0 */12 * * *), only 2 pipelines will be created per day. To change the Sidekiq worker’s frequency, you have to edit the pipeline_schedule_worker_cron value in your gitlab.rb and restart GitLab. For GitLab.com, you can check the dedicated settings page. If you don’t have admin access to the server, ask your administrator.