GitLab CI variables in job api? - gitlab-ci

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"

Answer 2

This is the way how I'm using it, didn't find a way to use API tokens for it though.
curl -X POST \
-F token=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx \
-F "ref=some_branch" \
-F "variables[VAR1]=abc" \
-F "variables[VAR2]=cde" \
"https://example.gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/312/trigger/pipeline"
Where -F "variables[VAR1]=abc" for example is set in .gitlab-ci.yml.
only:
variables:
- $VAR1
The idea was to create some manual CI jobs and tell the devs they can run them via API call, but since I can only use the project token here, it's absolutely not secure.
It would be really handy to run it via
curl --request PUT --header "PRIVATE-TOKEN: <your_access_token>"

Answer 3

Passing variables is documented in gitlab-org/gitlab issue 2772, but more about triggering pipeline (not job)
See if that syntax would work, for trigger variables (syntax variables[xxx]=yyy):
# gitlab-ci.yml
build:
script:
- curl --request POST --form "variables[PRE_CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE]=$CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE" --form "token=$CI_JOB_TOKEN" --form ref=master http://192.168.10.3:3001/api/v4/projects/13/trigger/pipeline
Or simply for regular variables --form key=value:
curl --request POST --form "token=$CI_JOB_TOKEN" --form ref=master https://gitlab.example.com/api/v4/projects/9/trigger/pipeline

Answer 4

It looks like that as of Jan 25, 2021 this feature not yet supported. There is a feature request I found here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/37267

Answer 5

Update 2022-03:
After you create a trigger token, and create trigger_pipeline step in pipeline, like this
trigger_pipeline:
tags:
image: alpine:latest
stage: deploy
script:
only:
variables:
- $MANUAL
you can use it to trigger pipelines with a tool that can access the API
curl --request POST \
--form token=TOKEN \
--form ref=main \
--form "variables[MANUAL]=true" \
"https://gitlab.example.com/api/v4/projects/123456/trigger/pipeline"
or a webhook:
https://gitlab.example.com/api/v4/projects/123456/ref/<ref_name>/trigger/pipeline?token=<token>
for example for manual run.