TIL: How to Cancel Stale Pipelines in GitLab CI

TIL: How to Cancel Stale Pipelines in GitLab CI

Today I learnt that we can cancel old pipelines in MRs. For example, you push a new commit, and you don’t care about the old pipeline running any more. You want to cancel them to save CI minutes etc.

Here is an example, you can see the 2nd pipeline is cancelled:

We need to add this to our .gitlab-ci.yml file. Where the default.interruptible marks every job as it can be cancelled ¹.

workflow:
  auto_cancel:
    on_new_commit: interruptible

default:
  interruptible: true

Then on new commits, we cancel all interruptible jobs. Just make sure to be careful where jobs actually deploy stuff. You don’t want to partially deploy things. But for jobs like running tests, linting etc this should be all good.

• Example gitlab pipeline