How can I update one variable value in a release?

I know this question has been up for debate before, but I like to raise it again.

We have an operations department that are totally separated from the product/developemtn team (don’t get me started about how feel about this). This is creating some challenges when it comes to deployment processes and especially releases. The operations department have control over our staging and production environments, which mean that the product team does not handle variables specified for these environemnts, but we create releases (yes, I am part of the product/development team).

Some times the operations department might be weeks behind, and when that happens, global variables shared between projects might have changed (the product teams are very agile and can create several releases per day and constantly evolving the applications). In this case, updating variables for a former release might screw up that release because it will get the updated global variables that are NOT compatible with that specific release. See the problem?

Therefor it would be terrific if one could update a specific variable instead of all of them.

I know, I know, the main problem lays in the organization layout. This would not be a problem if we were a cross funtional team spanning through all of the parts of the development process. However, sometimes it takes time to convince old companies to reorganize into something better.

Hi Fredrik,

Thanks for getting in touch.

I can understand the frustration of only being able to update some or all of your variables and neither option really working for you. I’ve tried to come up with a scripted solution but unfortunately I don’t think it is possible. Release variable sets are immutable and the only way to create a new snapshot is to pull in all of the variables.

I’ve created a user voice suggestion to start discussion and gather support around your request: https://octopusdeploy.uservoice.com/forums/170787-general/suggestions/18808624-add-ability-to-update-individual-variables-in-a-re

I hope this helps.

Cheers,
Shane