title: Bitbake: Is there a way to build all dependencies of an image recipe, but skip the actual image creation itself?
body: <p>I have a Yocto project that I’m building in a GitLab pipeline. For reasons (parallel toolchain for FPGA build) I’ve had to split the build into two pipeline jobs.</p>
  <p>The first job does a full image build but with a variable set to
  disable the FPGA install recipe (since there’s no FPGA file available at this time). This builds everything and stores results in the SSTATE cache (external from the GitLab runner - on a NFS volume mount, because I actually have multiple co-located runners).</p>
  <p>The second job, which runs once the FPGA file is available, some time later, performs the same build but with the FPGA install recipe enabled, so that the FPGA file ends up in the final image. This is much faster than the first job because it retrieves most of the packages from the SSTATE cache, courtesy of the first job.</p>
  <p>I should note that because it’s GitLab and running in Docker executor there’s no sharing of bitbake workspace between these jobs, so I rely on the SSTATE cache to carry state to the second job.</p>
  <p>My issue is that the image created by the first job is basically useless, since it is missing the FPGA file. It is thrown away. But it still took time to create the image. All I really needed from that first job is for the dependencies to be built and cached.</p>
  <p>So my question is - is it possible to set up bitbake such that it will build all of an image’s dependencies, but not the actual image recipe itself?</p>