We’re just starting to (finally) get Octopus up and running in our company. For one of our first apps to onboard, they have a slightly odd requirement.
They will have their normal “CD lifecycle” environments, so Dev (kicked off from Jenkins)->Assembly->Staging->Prod (eventually). No problem with that.
However, they also want 2 standalone environments, Sandbox and TPT, that won’t be part of the lifecycle, but that they still want to be able to deploy releases to.
Is there any particular best practice for modelling this in Octopus? Or is it as simple as just creating the lifecycle for the 4 “CD environments” and just leaving the other 2 as is and allowing them to manage their own deployments to those?
Thanks for getting in touch! Unfortunately you can’t deploy a release to an environment that isn’t part of the project lifecycle. You have two options here. You can create a lifecycle with Sandbox and TPT in the same phase as your Dev environment. Ensure that the following phase only requires the release to be deployed to a single environment to continue. Then you can manually deploy to Sandbox and TPT as required.
Your second option is to take a look at the new Channels feature if you haven’t already. If you are on Octopus 3.2 or higher you will already have a default channel which you can configure with your standard Dev->Assembly->Staging->Prod lifecycle. Then you could add a Sandbox channel with just a single stage with your Sandbox and TPT environments. In day to day use the default channel will operate as if the other environments aren’t there. Then users could manually create a Sandbox release as required, and push it to those two environments.
Documentation for Channels can be found here. You can also look at a walk through here. In particular the Early Access Program scenario here would be similar to your situation. You can safely ignore the stuff around version ranges and tags. Channels are an incredibly powerful feature, and this would be a great way to dip your toe into the waters. Please feel free to reach out again if you run into trouble, regardless of which option you pick.
