Octopus Hightlight environment in Blue /Green deployment

[mark.harrison]

Hi @vaibhavn

Thanks for your question!

My colleague wrote an article to a similar question about determining which environment in Blue/Green is actually deployed to here:

How can I automatically select Blue or Green for Blue/Green deployments using Octopus Deploy?

Both the blue and green versions of my web application are on the same VM. I use an F5 load balancer which points to either the blue version or the green version. My deployment looks like this (assume Blue is active): Deploy database Deploy to Green web application Update F5 to point to Green version of the application Right now I have to have two environments, one blue and one green. I’d like to have a single environment. How can I have a single environment, Production while still having…

However, the difference here is that they had one environment, and used the F5 load balancer to determine which “environment” was actually active.

To answer your questions:

Is there a way environment can be flagged or highlighted?

There’s no way to highlight a specific item on the dashboard for example that a particular environment is the one deployed as “active” (other than to have an environment called Production and deploy to it, but even then it won’t say whether it’s blue or green).

In case you haven’t seen it, I also wrote up the current ways you can use Octopus with Blue/Green:

How can I set up a blue/green deployment using Octopus Deploy?

In a blue-green deployment model, the production environment changes with each release and there are a few different strategies for implementing the pattern with Octopus Deploy. Using Octopus Environments The most common strategy is outlined in our Blue/Green documentation where you create two environments - one for Green, and one for Blue: [blue-green-create-envs] In order for you to be able to deploy to either of the two production environments, you will need to configure your Project lifec…

It’s quite a long read, but it does give some pros and cons of each approach you may not have considered.

Is there a way I can calculate the most recently deployed environment and get the environment name of it?

This will depend on exactly what criteria you want to sue to select as “most recently” deployed. But I think it should be possible to use the Octopus REST API. We have a bunch of examples looking at deployments in our GitHub repo here:

For example this script:

OctopusDeploy/OctopusDeploy-Api/blob/master/REST/PowerShell/Deployments/ReDeployLatestReleaseInEnvironment.ps1

Gets the latest release in a particular environment (and then redeploys it). You wouldn’t need the redeployment part, but could provide an example of a way you can query the Octopus REST API and then retrieve the details to meet your requirements.

I hope that helps!