Hi OctoDeployers! My team have been working on standardising a lot of the work we do in Octopus, and its great that the step template function allows us to create and edit standardised steps, and then roll them out to our projects.
One challenge this has presented however, is that if you introduce a defect when updating the version of the step template, there isn’t a way of:
Seeing the previous version of the step template to confirm your changes
The ability to roll back to a previous version of the step template.
You can perform some of this functionality in some places, like the script step, by using script inside a package however that doesn’t exempt you from making mistakes in your step template, only reduces it.
Step templates and Octopus’ roll forward/roll-back versioning are awesome features for us. Any chance of these features entering a newer version of the tool?
Thanks for getting in touch! Glad that you’ve found the step template feature useful.
Unfortunately, we don’t have any built-in functionality to compare changes between versions of your step templates or to roll back to previous versions. To allow comparisons like this, I’d suggest keeping each version of the step template in source control so you can compare them manually.
This sounds like a great idea to suggest on our UserVoice site. This is the main avenue we use when considering features/enhancements like this based on community support. https://octopusdeploy.uservoice.com
I did mention that in my post. It’s just a bit naff because while that does fix a lot of your issues, it doesn’t make you immune. You can still error out the parameters you request for, or other configuration no matter how small, and if you’ve patched the step template everywhere, you have to reverse engineer.
I’ll post in UseVoice, but you can close this off. I just wanted to mention that the workaround you’re suggesting still has shortcomings which is what prompted this discussion in the first place.