When creating releases in OD with a CI/CD system like Jenkins it looks like we have an option to rely on either Automatic Release Creation, ARC, or create it from cmd line using octo create-release , http://docs.octopus.com/display/OD/Creating+releases.
Our process is essentially, deploy every QA build to some QA environment (we run 3 QA environments in parallel) and may do builds for different versions to each, so:
- QA1 may have 1.0.1-build33
- QA2 may have 1.0.0-build23,
- QA3 may have 1.0.2-build10.
Eventually, one of these builds for each environments is promoted to PROD then that environment starts getting the next release in the pipeline (generally, skipping the others since branching / merging will catch that code base up) . In the above example, QA2 with 1.0.0, will probably get 1.0.3 after 1.0.0 is launched.
Until now we were relying on ARC to do this, but I think I may like the control of doing this from the command line more. We don’t make super heavy use of channels right now due to the high overhead of managing all our products (we have well over 300 different products / services / sites) and have occasionally seen ARC just not want to create a release since it thinks it’s older then the newest version (I think that’s what is occurring).
Is there a preferred / better way to so this? Or is this just a case of do what you prefer? What should I consider when choosing between these options?