.gitlab-ci.yml after_script section: how can I tell whether the task succeeded or failed?

Question

I'm using Gitlab CI, and so have been working on a fairly complex .gitlab-ci.yml file. The file has an after_script section which runs when the main task is complete, or the main task has failed somehow. Problem: I need to do different cleanup based on whether the main task succeeded or failed, but I can't find any Gitlab CI variable that indicates the result of the main task.

How can I tell, inside the after_script section, whether the main task has succeeded or failed?

Answer 1

The accepted answer may apply to most situations, but it doesn't answer the original question and will only work if you only have one job per stage.

Note: There currently a feature request opened (issues/3116) to handle on_failure and on_success in after_script.

It could be possible to use variables to pass the job status to an after_script script, but this also has a feature request (issues/1926) opened to be able to share variables between before_script, script and after_script.

One workaround will be to write to a temporary file that will be accessed during the after_script block.

test_job:
  stage: test
  before_script:
    - echo "FAIL" > .job_status
  script:
    - exit 1
    - echo "SUCCESS" > .job_status
  after_script:
    - echo "$(cat .job_status)"