Make repository topics/tags accessible in builds

[wass3rw3rk]

Description

There is desire to make repository topics/tags available within builds. For reference, in GitHub Actions this is currently accessible via ${{ toJSON(github.event.repository.topics) }}. Topics are also sent along with each webhook event in the Repository sub-field. Looked briefly into other SCM providers and they provide APIs for topic/tag retrieval (Gitlab¹, Gitea²), but don't seem to send them along with their webhook events as GitHub does. Found an open request on Gitlab to make this available: https://forum.gitlab.com/t/access-project-api-in-ci/81654 in their CI as well. Presumably it's not easily accessible there at the moment.

To increase reproducibility of builds, it would be ideal for topics/tags to be stored along with a build.

For now, I imagine that these would be accessible as a comma separated list in an environment variable like VELA_REPO_TAGS (for example).

Value

Some organizations utilize repo topics/tags to provide additional repo specific metadata. Having this data available in a build would aid in augmenting build artifact metadata downstream, for example.

Definition of Done

Repository topics/tags available via in a build via environment variable.

Effort (Optional)

Depends on implementation :)

Impacted Personas (Optional)

Users

Footnotes

1. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/api/projects.html#get-single-project ↩

2. https://try.gitea.io/api/swagger#/repository/repoListTags ↩