GitLab CI Break Lint

It reads a .gitlab-ci.yml as text and reports the lines GitLab no longer accepts, or will stop accepting at the next major release. Each finding gives the line number, the retired keyword or invalid wiring, and the replacement line. On the bundled 31-line dirty fixture it returns six findings; the clean rewrite returns none.

DevOps and platform engineers who own .gitlab-ci.yml files, especially on self-managed GitLab where the instance upgrade date is yours to schedule. It also helps anyone reviewing a pipeline an AI assistant drafted, because assistants mix GitHub Actions keys such as runs-on: and steps: into GitLab files.

GitLab's CI Lint validates the file against the version your instance runs right now. That is exactly the version where the retired keywords still work, so it returns a pass. The breakage appears on the first push after the upgrade, when those keywords are gone and the job that used them fails.

Free: lint the pipeline file you have open, with all 16 rules and every replacement line. The open file is finished when the report is empty. Paid: scan every pipeline file in the repository in one pass and export a dated Markdown upgrade report to attach to the change ticket.

A freelance DevOps engineer's hour runs about $100. Reading a repository's pipeline files line by line against a keyword removals list, then writing the replacements into a ticket, is most of a morning for one repository, and it has to be redone at every major release.