gitlab-ci-author

A guide for creating, fixing, and improving GitLab CI/CD configuration. CI/CD automatically builds, tests, and delivers code when changes are made.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to write or edit `.gitlab-ci.yml`, investigate failed jobs, speed up pipelines, or migrate another CI system to GitLab CI/CD.
Why use it?
It helps diagnose failed pipelines and organize jobs, dependencies, caches, outputs, and secrets without putting credentials directly in the configuration.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nickveenhof/cursor-gitlab-plugin/gitlab-ci-author
Any agent
npx skills add nickveenhof/cursor-gitlab-plugin --skill gitlab-ci-author
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nickveenhof/cursor-gitlab-plugin

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 19 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 318 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00019 $0.00318
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00159
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00064
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00032

Measured 2d ago against content hash 5acff60a9269, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

gitlab-ci-author scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/gitlab-ci-author/SKILL.md · 25 lines

What it actually says

GitLab CI/CD author

When to use

  • Creating or editing .gitlab-ci.yml files
  • Debugging failing pipelines
  • Optimizing CI/CD performance

Instructions

  1. Use rules: instead of only:/except: for job control.
  2. Use needs: to define a directed acyclic graph (DAG) for faster pipelines.
  3. Cache dependencies with cache: and use key: files: for lock-file-based cache keys.
  4. Store build outputs with artifacts: and set appropriate expire_in: values.
  5. Use CI/CD variables for secrets — never hardcode tokens or credentials.
  6. Prefer include: and CI/CD components for reusable configuration.
  7. When debugging pipelines, use the MCP tools manage_pipeline (list pipelines) and get_pipeline_jobs (inspect failed jobs) to fetch real data before suggesting fixes.
  8. For complex pipeline failures that require root-cause analysis and code changes, suggest the Fix CI/CD Pipeline Flow in GitLab's Duo Agent Platform.
  9. For migrating from Jenkins or other CI systems, suggest the Convert to GitLab CI/CD Flow.
Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 25 lines · 19 tokens per session scan A 5acff60a9269

Subscribe to this mod's changes

gitlab-ci-author is a skill published in the GitHub repository nickveenhof/cursor-gitlab-plugin (3 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 19 tokens to every session and 318 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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