Gitlab CI: Clone repo only before first build in pipeline - yaml

Question

I have ~5-10 builds in my .yml file for Gitlab CI. To save time, I'm wondering if there is a way to NOT re-clone the repo between every job. Ideally, the repo will be cloned once and then all 3 jobs run. I also don't want to combine the jobs into a single build because I'd like to see the results of each individually (when they are combined, gitlab's "pass/fail" is just the result of the last job).
I don't want to simply do git fetch because I want a fresh clone at the start.
stages:
- run
job1:
stage: run
script:
- pwd
- make all TEST=job1
job2:
stage: run
script:
- pwd
- make all TEST=job2
job3:
stage: run
script:
- pwd
- make all TEST=job3
...

Answer 1

I'm also fiddling around with this topic.
Actually, I go by doing a checkout-stage at first (with GIT_STRATEGY: clone) and then the build-stage with multiple jobs and GIT_STRATEGY: fetch.
This ensures that the repo is really full cloned at first and only fetched for every buildstep. Maybe this helps you too.
stages:
- checkout
- build
checkout:
variables:
GIT_STRATEGY: clone
GIT_SUBMODULE_STRATEGY: recursive
stage: checkout
script: '#echo Checking out...'
build:commander:
stage: build
variables:
GIT_STRATEGY: fetch
script:
- _Publish.bat commander
artifacts:
paths:
- BuildArtifacts\Commander\**
build:login:
stage: build
variables:
GIT_STRATEGY: fetch
script:
- _Publish.bat login
artifacts:
paths:
- BuildArtifacts\Login\**
build:cli:
stage: build
variables:
GIT_STRATEGY: fetch
script:
- _Publish.bat cli
artifacts:
paths:
- BuildArtifacts\Cli\**

Answer 2

This might be helpful, assuming you are using a new enough version of gitlab and the runner: https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/ci/yaml/README.html#git-strategy
You can set your git-strategy to none, and manually clone the repo in your before_script section.
This will have some difficulties still - because different runners can service different jobs, if you don't have a dedicated runner for this project, all runners would need access to the repo location.