← Product Feedback

What problem could Octopus Deploy solve for you?

Product Feedback: Deployments

Categories

(thinking…)

Let octo.exe auto-select the right Channel when creating a Release based on Version Rules

It would be really nice if octo.exe could make an intelligent decision and automatically select the correct Channel for a Release based on the Version Rules.

As of Octopus Deploy 3.2 you need to explicitly choose a Channel for a Release, unless you intend to use the Default Channel. This doesn't help when you are supporting multiple active versions.

Whilst this wouldn't work for every situation, it would be brilliant if I'm following a strict versioning convention for my packages and Releases, and configured explicit and independent Version Rules, that octo.exe could pick the right Channel.

I would imagine octo.exe would:
1. Have an extra argument like --channelAuto
2. Query the Project for Channels
3. Filter out Channels that don't have Version Rules that match the Release being created
4. If there's only one suitable Channel, use that. Otherwise raise an error explaining there were zero, or multiple Channels that could have been auto-selected, and the user should fix their Version Rules, or specify the Channel explicitly with the --channel argument.

8 votes

We're glad you're here

Please sign in to leave feedback
Signed in as (Sign out)
Close
Close

We’ll send you updates on this idea

Michael Noonan shared this idea  ·   ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

How important is this to you?

We're glad you're here

Please sign in to leave feedback
Signed in as (Sign out)
Close
Close
Released  ·  AdminProduct Team (Admin, Octopus Deploy) responded  · 

Check out the GitHub issue and related pull requests https://github.com/OctopusDeploy/Issues/issues/2494

We ended up deciding to make this the default behaviour after a bunch of testing and working with some interested customers.

We have just finished this as part of Octo.exe 3.3.13 which shipped connected to Octopus 3.3.13, but the auto channel discovery will work with any release of Octopus 3.2 or greater.

We're glad you're here

Please sign in to leave feedback
Signed in as (Sign out)
Close
Close
Submitting...
An error occurred while saving the comment
  • Ben Duguid commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Great idea - I'm trying to use Channels to control the lifecycles available to a release - at the moment we have the following lifecycles:

    * Dev Only - Only deploys to our internal developer environments - used to dev. test feature branches as they are being worked on
    * QA/UAT - Can deploy to our internal dev and QA environments, as well as client UAT environments - used to QA and UAT develop branch prior to release candidate.
    * Full - Can deploy through the entire stack (Dev -> Production) - only available to release builds that can be considered for a production deployment.

    I'm tagging all the builds (possibly not strictly SemVer in this case) so that I can filter these within channels, but at the moment I'm having to work out which channel to use in our TeamCity build and pass that in as a variable to the Create Release step.

  • Michael Noonan commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    That's a good point David, since it's a more permissive argument, we should let the default behaviour be more permissive. Makes sense to me.

  • David White commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    This is a very sensible (brilliant, actually) idea. It makes sense for all our products - they either have Version Rules (to handle multiple simultaneous branches), or they don't.

    --channelAuto is saying "I know that this could break if I don't get it right, but I'm doing this deliberately, because I want the functionality."

    (Incidentally, if there are zero channels that match the Version Rules, shouldn't --channelAuto pick the Default channel?)

  • Michael Noonan commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I'd be interested to see explicit examples where this would/wouldn't make sense for your own deployments.