- Available feature flags
- Enable feature flag in pipeline configuration
- Enable feature flag in runner environment variables
- Enable feature flag in runner configuration
GitLab Runner feature flags
Introduced in GitLab 11.4.
Feature flags are toggles that allow you to enable or disable specific features. These flags are typically used:
-
For beta features that are made available for volunteers to test, but that are not ready to be enabled for all users.
Beta features are sometimes incomplete or need further testing. A user who wants to use a beta feature can choose to accept the risk and explicitly enable the feature with a feature flag. Other users who do not need the feature or who are not willing to accept the risk on their system have the feature disabled by default and are not impacted by possible bugs and regressions.
-
For breaking changes that result in functionality deprecation or feature removal in the near future.
As the product evolves, features are sometimes changed or removed entirely. Known bugs are often fixed, but in some cases, users have already found a workaround for a bug that affected them; forcing users to adopt the standardized bug fix might cause other problems with their customized configurations.
In such cases, the feature flag is used to switch from the old behavior to the new one on demand. This allows users to adopt new versions of the product while giving them time to plan for a smooth, permanent transition from the old behavior to the new behavior.
Feature flags are toggled using environment variables. To:
- Activate a feature flag, set the corresponding environment variable to
"true"
or1
. - Deactivate a feature flag, set the corresponding environment variable to
"false"
or0
.
Available feature flags
Feature flag | Default value | Deprecated | To be removed with | Description |
---|---|---|---|---|
FF_CMD_DISABLE_DELAYED_ERROR_LEVEL_EXPANSION | false | No | Disables EnableDelayedExpansion for error checking for when using Window Batch shell | |
FF_NETWORK_PER_BUILD | false | No | Enables creation of a Docker network per build with the docker executor | |
FF_USE_LEGACY_KUBERNETES_EXECUTION_STRATEGY | false | No | When set to false disables execution of remote Kubernetes commands through exec in favor of attach to solve problems like #4119
| |
FF_USE_DIRECT_DOWNLOAD | true | No | When set to true Runner tries to direct-download all artifacts instead of proxying through GitLab on a first try. Enabling might result in a download failures due to problem validating TLS certificate of Object Storage if it is enabled by GitLab. See Self-signed certificates or custom Certification Authorities
| |
FF_SKIP_NOOP_BUILD_STAGES | true | No | When set to false all build stages are executed even if running them has no effect | |
FF_USE_FASTZIP | false | No | Fastzip is a performant archiver for cache/artifact archiving and extraction | |
FF_DISABLE_UMASK_FOR_DOCKER_EXECUTOR | false | No | If enabled will remove the usage of umask 0000 call for jobs executed with docker executor. Instead Runner will try to discover the UID and GID of the user configured for the image used by the build container and will change the ownership of the working directory and files by running the chmod command in the predefined container (after updating sources, restoring cache and downloading artifacts). POSIX utility id must be installed and operational in the build image for this feature flag. Runner will execute id with options -u and -g to retrieve the UID and GID. | |
FF_ENABLE_BASH_EXIT_CODE_CHECK | false | No | If enabled, bash scripts don’t rely solely on set -e , but check for a non-zero exit code after each script command is executed. | |
FF_USE_WINDOWS_LEGACY_PROCESS_STRATEGY | true | No | When disabled, processes that Runner creates on Windows (shell and custom executor) will be created with additional setup that should improve process termination. This is currently experimental and how we setup these processes may change as we continue to improve this. When set to true , legacy process setup is used. To successfully and gracefully drain a Windows Runner, this feature flag should be set to false . | |
FF_USE_NEW_BASH_EVAL_STRATEGY | false | No | When set to true , the Bash eval call is executed in a subshell to help with proper exit code detection of the script executed. | |
FF_USE_POWERSHELL_PATH_RESOLVER | false | No | When enabled, PowerShell resolves pathnames rather than Runner using OS-specific filepath functions that are specific to where Runner is hosted. | |
FF_USE_DYNAMIC_TRACE_FORCE_SEND_INTERVAL | false | No | When enabled, the trace force send interval for logs is dynamically adjusted based on the trace update interval. | |
FF_SCRIPT_SECTIONS | false | No | When enabled, each script line from the .gitlab-ci.yml file is in a collapsible section in the job output, and shows the duration of each line. When the command spans multiple lines, the complete command is displayed within the job log output terminal. | |
FF_USE_NEW_SHELL_ESCAPE | false | No | When enabled, a faster implementation of shell escape is used. | |
FF_ENABLE_JOB_CLEANUP | false | No | When enabled, the project directory will be cleaned up at the end of the build. If GIT_CLONE is used, the whole project directory will be deleted. If GIT_FETCH is used, a series of Git clean commands will be issued. | |
FF_KUBERNETES_HONOR_ENTRYPOINT | false | No | When enabled, the Docker entrypoint of an image will be honored if FF_USE_LEGACY_KUBERNETES_EXECUTION_STRATEGY is not set to true | |
FF_POSIXLY_CORRECT_ESCAPES | false | No | When enabled, POSIX shell escapes are used rather than bash -style ANSI-C quoting. This should be enabled if the job environment uses a POSIX-compliant shell. | |
FF_USE_IMPROVED_URL_MASKING | false | No | When enabled, any sensitive URL parameters are masked no matter where they appear in the trace log output. When this is disabled, sensitive URL parameters are only masked in select places and can occasionally be revealed. This feature flag can only be configured via Runner’s config and not from a job. | |
FF_RESOLVE_FULL_TLS_CHAIN | false | No | In GitLab Runner 16.4 and later, the default is false . In GitLab Runner 16.3 and earlier, the default is true . When enabled, the runner resolves a full TLS chain all the way down to a self-signed root certificate for CI_SERVER_TLS_CA_FILE . This was previously required to make Git HTTPS clones work for a Git client built with libcurl prior to v7.68.0 and OpenSSL. However, the process to resolve certificates might fail on some operating systems, such as macOS, that reject root certificates signed with older signature algorithms. If certificate resolution fails, you might need to disable this feature. This feature flag can only be disabled in the [runners.feature_flags] configuration. | |
FF_DISABLE_POWERSHELL_STDIN | false | No | When enabled, PowerShell scripts for shell and custom executors are passed by file, rather than passed and executed via stdin. | |
FF_USE_POD_ACTIVE_DEADLINE_SECONDS | true | No | When enabled, the pod activeDeadlineSeconds is set to the CI/CD job timeout. This flag affects the pod’s lifecycle. | |
FF_USE_ADVANCED_POD_SPEC_CONFIGURATION | false | No | When enabled, the user can set an entire whole pod specification in the config.toml file. For more information, see Overwrite generated pod specifications (Alpha).. | |
FF_SET_PERMISSIONS_BEFORE_CLEANUP | true | No | When enabled, permissions on directories and files in the project directory are set first, to ensure that deletions during cleanup are successful. | |
FF_SECRET_RESOLVING_FAILS_IF_MISSING | true | No | When enabled, secret resolving fails if the value cannot be found. | |
FF_RETRIEVE_POD_WARNING_EVENTS | false | No | When enabled, all warning events associated with the Pod are retrieved when the job fails. | |
FF_PRINT_POD_EVENTS | false | No | When enabled, all events associated with the build pod will be printed until it’s started. |
Enable feature flag in pipeline configuration
You can use CI variables to enable feature flags:
-
For all jobs in the pipeline (globally):
variables: FEATURE_FLAG_NAME: 1
-
For a single job:
job: stage: test variables: FEATURE_FLAG_NAME: 1 script: - echo "Hello"
Enable feature flag in runner environment variables
To enable the feature for every job a Runner runs, specify the feature
flag as an
environment
variable
in the Runner configuration:
[[runners]]
name = "ruby-2.7-docker"
url = "https://CI/"
token = "TOKEN"
limit = 0
executor = "docker"
builds_dir = ""
shell = ""
environment = ["FEATURE_FLAG_NAME=1"]
Enable feature flag in runner configuration
Introduced in GitLab Runner 13.11.
You can enable feature flags by specifying them under [runners.feature_flags]
. This
setting prevents any job from overriding the feature flag values.
Some feature flags are also only usable when you configure this setting, because they don’t deal with how the job is executed.
[[runners]]
name = "ruby-2.7-docker"
url = "https://CI/"
token = "TOKEN"
executor = "docker"
[runners.feature_flags]
FF_USE_DIRECT_DOWNLOAD = true