GitLab Pipeline Status is Wrong

If you have more than one pipeline job for the same commit, like Tugboat, Tugboat - Visual Diffs, and Tugboat - Lighthouse, sometimes the status of these pipelines in GitLab may not match the status in your Tugboat Dashboard.

What is going on?

When a merge request is opened or a push occurs, a preview build is triggered via a webhook. Tugboat then uses the GitLab API to send commit status updates for the preview. These updates are known as external commit statuses and appear in GitLab as the Tugboat, Tugboat - Visual Diffs, and Tugboat - Lighthouse, jobs under the external stage.

According to the GitLab documentation on external commit statuses, when an external system (such as Tugboat) posts status updates, GitLab tries to find the most recent non-archived pipeline for that commit and append the status to it. However, the documentation also states:

When duplicate pipelines exist for the same commit, external status placement becomes ambiguous. GitLab selects the latest pipeline using newest_first, but with concurrent pipeline creation, this can lead to external statuses appearing in unexpected pipelines or becoming invisible in merge request views.

Because of this, a Tugboat customer can end up in situations where:

• The commit status doesn’t appear at all, even though it was sent.
• An older commit pipeline shows the Tugboat status as passed.
• The newest commit pipeline has no Tugboat status at all.

How do I fix it?

We are investigating and gathering information about this scenario. Reach out to our support team if you are encountering this problem and would like to share information about when this is occuring for you.