Manual Child Steps

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1

I have a website deployment that has a database roll and a web site roll. Before any steps that affect the database roll take place, I have a manual intervention step that waits for the DB group to approve the deployment.

Works great.

The only problem I have is that sometimes a deployment doesn’t need a change to the DB roll (ie a bug fix that doesn’t involve a change to the database). So we skip the related DB steps. But we CAN’T skip the Manual intervention step.

It would be nice if I could skip the manual intervention step if the related steps were also skipped. So I hoped that If I put everything in child steps I could skip the whole branch.

Example

  1. Deploy DB parent (does nothing)
    1 .1 email DB notice of deployment

    1. 2 wait for DB teams approval
      1.3 backup databse
      1.4 run sql migrations

  2. Deploy website
    2.1 update website
    2 2 update web service

If I could skip the whole step 1. Then I wouldn’t have to wait for an approval from a group when nothing on their end is changing.

But it seems like the only things we can put in child steps right now are power shell and nuget packages.

Does that make sense?

Great work on V2 by the way. We are really happy with it so far.

2

Hi,

In 2.0 I believe it is possible to skip a manual step just like any other step; is this not the case? (We have a big report that we should be able to prevent skipping).

Paul

3

I hadn’t checked, I just assumed that you still couldn’t. So that will solve the problem for now.

However, I agree that you shouldn’t be able to skip manual steps. I only want to be able to skip them when the related steps that I am trying to protect, are also being skipped.