[FIXED] Why is GitLab CI/CD ignoring certain files when passing them as an artifact?

Issue

I have a simple CI/CD setup for my GitLab repo.

During the build job, the commands install NPM, run a build script which uses Webpack to build the JS/SCSS etc.

Then, since I don't want any of the source files to be uploaded to my server, I remove them along with some other files that are not needed for deployment.

However, when the parent directory htdocs is uploaded as an artifact so it can be used in the deploy job, when I run ls -la and ls ./assets -la in the deploy job, I can still see all of the files that I removed earlier in the build job.

When I download the artifact ZIP file from the browser, everything is correct as all of my unneeded files are gone.

Why is it then I can still see BOTH the source and distributed files in the build job? Is this a bug?

At the moment this is causing all of my source files to be uploaded to my server which is not what I want. Can anyone help?

image: node:11.9.0

before_script:
  - cd ./htdocs

stages:
  - build
  - deploy

build:
  stage: build
  script:
    - npm install --quiet
    - npm run build
    - rm -rf node_modules assets/src
    - rm -r .??* package.json package-lock.json README.md webpack.*.js
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - ./htdocs/

deploy:
  stage: deploy
  cache: {}
  dependencies:
    - build
  script:
    - ls -la
    - ls ./assets/ -la

Solution

Every job in GitLab by default clones the repository and then downloads any artifacts you set in the dependencies. You should see this at the start of the job log of the deploy stage.

To stop your source files from being uploaded in your deploy stage, you could set the GIT_STRATEGY to none.

Eg:

deploy:
  stage: deploy
  cache: {}
  variables:
    GIT_STRATEGY: none
  dependencies:
    - build
  script:
    - ls -la
    - ls ./assets/ -la

Answered By - Rekovni

Answer Checked By - Mildred Charles (PHPFixing Admin)