Change value of variables between jobs in Gitlab

Variable scope inside Gitlab-CI is either local to a job or global. At the time of the writing, late 2021, you can not interact with a global variable to change his value from stage to stage. I have read complains about this.

Here is a weird or hugly workaround, call it how you like, but it does the job.

I'm not a Gitlab expert, I might miss something, but here is my need.

• down, process and up are two different runner (tags), it cannot be a before_script of each other.
• If we failed before the down, no need to up after.
• once the down is processed, you do the up after regardless the process result.

How I done in Gitlab.

# .gitlab-ci.yaml

maintenance_down:
  stage: maintenance_down
  tags:
    - gcp-shell
  script:
    - echo "MAINTENANCE=DOWN" >> build.env
    - artisan down
  artifacts:
    reports:
      dotenv: build.env

process:
# some stuff

maintenance_up:
  stage: maintenance_up
  dependencies:
    - maintenance_down
  tags:
    - gcp-shell
  when: always
  script:
    - echo $MAINTENANCE
    - (if [ "$MAINTENANCE" == "DOWN" ]; then artisan up; fi);

Let's explain breifly, you store your variables in a file that will be pass througt jobs as dependencies with the artifacts "reports.dotenv". Told you, hugly hack...

I understand that jobs could be run in differants runner, in parallele, but it would be nice to have some better way to do this.

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