Best New Features in GitLab 14.2 and 14.3 ⛲

In the last two versions of GitLab, 7 features and improvements caught my attention. 👁️

Two months ago, on September 22, GitLab 14.3 was released. It made me realize that I forgot to check the releases notes for the previous version, 14.2. 😅

So, in this post, I’m going to address that by highlighting some of the new features and improvements that you might be interested in. 😬

GitLab 14.2

Use CI/CD variables in include statements in .gitlab-ci.yml

By allowing the use of variables inside the include keyword, it will open new ways to define CI/CD pipelines. An example is to allow updating of the template in multiple projects through the use of a variable as below.

include:
  project: 'my-group/ci-pipelines'
  ref: $PIPELINE_TEMPLATE_REF
  file: 'templates/main.yml'

An example of a variable inside the include keyword.

A DevOps engineer could just update the $PIPELINE_TEMPLATE_REF variable in the group CI variables and all projects would use the new version of the template. Incredible, right? 🤩

Stageless pipelines