I’m hoping to improve our current Live deployment process by moving the approval into the Octopus workflow. Currently we do this through change requests on a different software, where a client manager will request a deployment, specify a release and time slot.
I’d like to remove these admin steps and use the ‘manual intervention’ steps in octopus, however it looks like this won’t work with scheduled deployments.
What I’m hoping to achieve is that the client manager logs into octopus, they schedule a Live deployment for another day, and at this point the manual intervention step is invoked.
It may not work exactly as you want, if the first step in the deployment is a manual intervention step then setting a scheduled deployment won’t trigger the intervention step until the specified time. Once the scheduled time is reached the manual intervention will run and the deployment will pause.
This means that someone will need to be available at the scheduled time to accept the intervention; which I believe isn’t what you want?
One possible way of organising it so that the manual intervention/approval is sent out immediately but the rest of the deployment then waits until a specified time would be to use a new project to perform orchestration.
You could have a fresh project with a Manual Intervention step and then a Chain Deployment step. Within the chain deployment step you can specify what time to trigger the targeted project.
By default, the time would be set within the step so would not be easily changed, if this isn’t perfect, you can set it as a variable and configure the variable to be prompted at deployment time.
I hope this helps point you in the right direction, let me know if I can provide any further details for you.
Thanks Paul, I’m still hoping to use Octopus for the whole process as either way it will be a step in the right direction for us. I haven’t used the chain deployment and prompted variables before so will definitely give those a go.
If I understand right, I can use them to ask the requester for an input time, and this will be used within the chain deployment after the manual intervention, is that right?
So that deployment would begin immediately and run the manual intervention step.
Then, once the manual intervention step is accepted it would generate a deployment for the target project and set it to run at 21:00.
