What happens to the CI_APPLICATION_REPOSITORY and CI_APPLICATION_TAG variables if the DOCKER_IMAGE CI/CD variable is provided?

When the DOCKER_IMAGE CI/CD variable is provided, the CI_APPLICATION_REPOSITORY and CI_APPLICATION_TAG variables are ignored. This means that the presence of the DOCKER_IMAGE variable supersedes any values that may have been assigned to the other two variables.

In the context of GitLab CI/CD, the DOCKER_IMAGE variable is specifically designed to define the Docker image to be used in your CI/CD pipeline. When this variable is specified, it essentially directs the pipeline to utilize the Docker image defined by this variable instead of deriving image details from the CI_APPLICATION_REPOSITORY and CI_APPLICATION_TAG variables. As a result, these two variables, which would normally be used to construct the image name and tag, do not come into play when DOCKER_IMAGE is present, making them redundant for that particular pipeline execution.