I have a lot of pipelines where I build things, and then the deployment runs on releases and is triggerd by a pipeline trigger. So to only run build/test jobs when pushing to gitlab, I have this:

job:
  only:
    refs:
      - branches

But according to Gitlab’s CI/CD YAML syntax reference , only and except are deprecated, so I am trying to figure out how to do the same with rules.

After a deep read of the rules possibility, I am down to these two possibilities:

job:
   rules:
     - if: $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH

or

job:
   rules:
     - if: $CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE == 'push' && $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH

But I don’t really understand which would be better, and which is the correct translation. I asked a few llms, and their answers were confusing at best.