The Syntactic Sugar extensions to the Step Definition

The Step Definition describes a minimal required syntax to be supported. To aid common workflows the following syntactic sugar is used to extend different parts of that document.

Syntactic Sugar for Step Reference

Each of syntactic sugar extensions is converted into the simple step reference.

Easily execute scripts in a target environment

script: is a shorthand syntax to aid execution of simple scripts, which cannot be used with step: and is run by an externally stored step component provided by GitLab.

The GitLab-provided step component performs shell auto-detection unless overwritten, similar to how GitLab Runner does that now: based on a running system.

inputs: and env: can be used for additional control of some aspects of that step component.

For example:

spec:
---
type: steps
steps:
  - script: bundle exec rspec
  - script: bundle exec rspec
    inputs:
      shell: sh  # Force runner to use `sh` shell, instead of performing auto-detection

This syntax example translates into the following equivalent syntax for execution by the Step Runner:

spec:
---
type: steps
steps:
  - step: gitlab.com/gitlab-org/components/steps/script@v1.0
    inputs:
      script: bundle exec rspec
  - step: gitlab.com/gitlab-org/components/steps/script@v1.0
    inputs:
      script: bundle exec rspec
      shell: sh  # Force runner to use `sh` shell, instead of performing auto-detection

This syntax example is invalid (and ambiguous) because the script: and step: cannot be used together:

spec:
---
type: steps
steps:
  - step: gitlab.com/my-component/ruby/install@v1.0
    script: bundle exec rspec