In my pipeline, I’d like to have a job run only if the Merge Requests target branch is a certain branch, say release/1.0.0-rc or release/1.5.0-rc, etc.

Here is my job:

build-composer:
  stage: build-app
  image:
    name: $PHP_IMAGE
    entrypoint: [""]
  script:
    - composer install
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - vendor/
    expire_in: 1h
  rules:
    - if: '$CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == "dev" && $CI_COMMIT_TAG == null'
      when: always
    - if: '$CI_MERGE_REQUEST_SOURCE_BRANCH_NAME == "dev" && $CI_MERGE_REQUEST_TARGET_BRANCH_NAME =~ /^release/.*$/ && $CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE == "merge_request_event" && $CI_MERGE_REQUEST_STATE == "merged"'
      when: always
    - if: '$CI_MERGE_REQUEST_SOURCE_BRANCH_NAME =~ /^feature/.*$/ && $CI_MERGE_REQUEST_TARGET_BRANCH_NAME == "dev" && $CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE == "merge_request_event" && $CI_MERGE_REQUEST_STATE == "merged"'
      when: always

the attempt to merge the request from the feature/* branch to dev successfully triggered the pipeline to run after the merge. However, when merging from the dev branch to release/1.0.0-rc, no pipeline is triggered.

I’ve also tried changing =~ /^release/.*$/ to == "release/**", but no luck.