Hi Jon,
If I understand you correctly, you have the following setup:
- Dev UI Test
- QA UI Test
- … Maybe more phases afterwards
You want to deploy to a new environment (Dev Showcase). In terms of the lifecycle, this should fit in after deploying to Dev UI Test because you want to promote a successful deployment from Dev UI Test to Dev Showcase.
You can do this by modifying your lifecycle to match the following:
- Dev UI Test
- Dev Showcase (optional)
- QA UI Test
- … other phases
Here you can make the Dev Showcase phase an optional phase, which means that:
- you can still promote deployments to QA UI Test once your Dev UI Test deployment is green.
- you have to go through the Dev UI Test deployment before deploying to Dev Showcase.
You can read more about lifecycles and optional phases here: https://octopus.com/docs/key-concepts/lifecycles#Lifecycles-OptionalPhases
Octopus does not currently have any support for recurring scheduled deployments, although it is a commonly requested feature. You can read more about it on our UserVoice forum: https://octopusdeploy.uservoice.com/forums/170787-general/suggestions/6599104-recurring-scheduled-deployments
You will instead need to create a scheduled task in some other system, where this scheduled task will tell Octopus to deploy the latest release to your Dev Showcase environment.
There are a number of ways you could prepare this scheduled task. If you are already using TeamCity, then this is probably the easiest option, as TeamCity has support for scheduling builds, and there is a TeamCity plugin for Octopus that you can use to deploy the release.
If you aren’t using TeamCity, then you could use a Windows scheduled task, or an Azure Function. There are a number of Octopus tools you could use to help you write this task. For example, you could use Octo.exe, or Octopus.Client, or access the Octopus REST API directly.
If you have a look at the comments on the UserVoice forum post, you will find a code sample that promotes releases from one environment to another: https://octopus.com/docs/guides/coordinating-multiple-projects/project-coordination-code-samples#ProjectCoordinationCodeSamples-Promotingagroupofprojects. You could use this as a starting point.
Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any further questions or need any help preparing the scheduled task.
Regards,
Tom