Ignoring Job Failure

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to use the allow_failure keyword to ignore specific job failures and continue executing dependent jobs in your GitLab CI/CD pipeline. By default, if a job fails, all downstream jobs that needs it are skipped and the entire pipeline is marked as failed.

What Is allow_failure?

According to the GitLab CI/CD YAML syntax reference, allow_failure is a boolean or a set of exit codes that determines whether a job failure should block the pipeline:

job2:
  stage: test
  script:
    - execute_script_2
  allow_failure: true

With allow_failure: true, even if job2 exits with a non-zero status, the pipeline continues and is marked as passed with warnings.

Controlling Failures by Exit Code

You can restrict which exit codes are treated as allowed failures. Any exit code not listed will still fail the pipeline:

test_job_1:
  script:
    - echo "This script exits with code 1, so the job fails."
    - exit 1
  allow_failure:
    exit_codes: [137]

test_job_2:
  script:
    - echo "This script exits with code 137, so the job is allowed to fail."
    - exit 137
  allow_failure:
    exit_codes:
      - 137
      - 255

Applying allow_failure to Your Pipeline

Update the existing code_coverage job so its failure is ignored and the dependent job still runs:

code_coverage:
  stage: test
  image: node:17-alpine3.14
  before_script:
    - npm install
  script:
    - npm run coverage
  artifacts:
    name: Code-Coverage-Result
    when: always
    expire_in: 3 days
    reports:
      coverage_report:
        coverage_format: cobertura
        path: coverage/cobertura-coverage.xml
  coverage: '/All files[^|]*|[^|]*\s+([\d.]+)/'
  allow_failure: true

sample-job:
  stage: test
  needs:
    - code_coverage
  image: node:17-alpine3.14
  script:
    - echo testing sample job

Commit and push this change to your feature branch. The sample-job will run even if code_coverage fails.

Viewing the Pipeline Status

After updating your pipeline:

• The overall status is passed but displays a warning icon (⚠️).
• The code_coverage job shows “failed with warnings.”
• Dependent jobs like sample-job still execute:

$ echo testing sample job
testing sample job

Accessing Coverage Artifacts

Since code_coverage produces a Cobertura XML report, download it even if the job fails:

1. Navigate to CI/CD > Jobs and click the code_coverage job.
2. In the sidebar, select Artifacts.
3. Download cobertura-coverage.xml (available for 3 days).

References

• GitLab CI/CD YAML syntax reference
• GitLab Pipelines documentation
• Managing job artifacts in GitLab