Create new project by copying another

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1

Hi Paul,

I’ve just hit a situation where it would be really useful to create a new project from an existing one. Clearly not an urgent feature, but useful I think.

Thanks,
John

2

Hi again,

This kind of feature would also be useful for variables. I’m currently working on a relatively complex deployment and it has a number of variables assigned to it. Up to this point I have been focussing on deployment to my dev platform, but am now ready to move on - the ‘problem’ is that I now have to re-create all these variables for my new target platforms as the values will be different. What would be nice would be a way to copy all the variables from one target platform to another to save on some typing/time.

Thanks,
John

3

I love this suggestion.

Note that if the same variable applies to all environments, you can just leave the ‘Environment’ field set to ‘(All)’ (I assume that’s what you mean by platform)

Paul

4

Hi Paul,

Glad you like it! In terms of the variables, what I meant was that you may have the same variable names required for a different environment (not platform as I think I said before) and with a different value - hope that makes it a bit clearer?

One additional thing, which I think would just make things a little bit ‘cooler’ - when you’re on a page where a deployment is in progress (particularly the Dashboard), could the status be automatically updated every few seconds? At the moment you have to refresh the page (at least you do in Chrome, maybe this is not the case in other browsers?) which isn’t the end of the world but would make at least the ‘Dashboard’ page more useful I think. One reason for this is that we have a large monitor centrally located in our office that cycles through Pivotal Tracker/TeamCity build status and a few other things and I’d like to add the Octopus Dashboard to this so we can see the deployment status too.

I’d also like to add that I think the product is coming along really well, keep up the good work! :slight_smile:

Thanks,
John

5

Hi John,

I’ve implemented a ‘duplicate’ button next to variables now, and the Dashboard page has a meta-refresh so it will update every 5 seconds or so. I’ll push up a new build shortly once I have tested it more thoroughly.

Can you explain more about why you would need to clone a project? It’s not hard to implement, but it feels ‘wrong’ to me based on my ideas about how Octopus would be used. Would you end up having two projects deploying the same packages? What would you then change between the projects?

Paul

6

Hi Paul,

Thanks for updating me on progress, sounds good! In terms of the project cloning, in my particular scenario I wanted a copy of the original project so I could do some isolated testing on a couple of steps - having thought about this further, what would arguably make more sense would be the ability to enable/disable steps to facilitate this kind of thing. I suspect that being able to create one project from another may still be a useful feature, maybe there should be an area of the Octopus site where people can vote on suggestions such as this to gauge interest?

Thanks again,
John

7

Hi John,

Another good example of where this would be used was suggested to me by someone else - setting up deployment for a branch. I agree with you that it would be useful so I’ll implement it in v1.

The build containing variable cloning is available for download:

Paul