Drone CI has special handling for ${VAR} and will replace it itself instead of letting the shell do it. So if you have export PATH=${GOPATH}/bin:$PATH and have $GOPATH defined in your global environment key, then it’ll become a blank value. But if you do export PATH=$GOPATH/bin:$PATH it’ll work. You can escape by adding an extra dollar sign, i.e. $${VAR} will be evaluated by the shell.

This is different from normal shell where ${VAR} is the same as $VAR and it exists to make sure you can concatenate strings without issues, i.e.

VAR=m000
echo "'${VAR}est'"  # => 'm000est'
echo "'$VARest'"    # => ''

Drone CI will not smartly skip subsequent steps if you have a when on the very first step in a depends_on chain, so you have to repeat the when condition for each step because it doesn’t realize that the first dependency is gone.

Drone CI’s when for deciding in which cases to run steps/pipelines targets the merge target branch for PRs and not the actual PR’s, also it pulls from refs/pull/<num>/head instead of refs/heads/<branch> so you can’t target the branch itself using the pull_request event (use push on the pipeline and then branch for the step instead).