addendum you can also do something like this, which means you don’t have to redefine every job in your main ci file, just define the ones you don’t want to run

    include:
      project: 'cicd/templates'
      file: 'builds.yml'

    variables:
      IMAGE_NAME: something
      IMAGE_REPO: some.org

    job_b:
      rules:
        - when: never

where the template you import has a job_a and job_b definition. both get pulled in, but job_b gets overwritten so it never runs.

less useful when just splitting things into multiple files to make life simpler.

super useful when using the same templates across multiple independent repositories to make everything build in as close to the same way as possible.