gitlab: How to have a another gitlab-ci.yml and use it whenever i want, instead of automatic triggering

Question

I have a gitlab-ci.yml file, which gets triggered when I commit changes.

I want to have another file gitlab-ci-notrigger.yml which will not be triggered. But I can use this to run pipeline whenever i want manually

Answer 1

You can create a job than must be run manually

You can require that a job doesn’t run unless a user starts it.
This is called a manual job.

You might want to use a manual job for something like deploying to production.

To specify a job as manual, add when: manual to the job in the .gitlab-ci.yml file.

By default, manual jobs display as skipped when the pipeline starts.

The OP adds:

# WANT deploy-to-stage TO BE RUN ONLY WHEN automatic
deploy-to-stage:
  stage: staging
  script:
    -..........

Check if using except can help:

# WANT deploy-to-stage TO BE RUN ONLY WHEN automatic
deploy-to-stage:
  stage: staging
  rules:
    - except: manual
  script:
    -..........