Managing Deployments
Pipelines can be written with your specific branching methodology in mind but when it comes to deployments you often want to be very intentional with triggering a change. For this reason, Vela has deployments, a unique build event that is triggered directly via Vela on a specific ref (branch, SHA, tag).
Vela leverages a deep integration with GitHub Deployments which will not only trigger your build but create a system of record on GitHub for your deployment action. You can leverage a deployment in your steps like:
Tip:
Make sure you have the deployment event enabled within repo settings
Additionally, any secret you may need for the event must also have deployments allowed for events.
# A step triggering on "all" deployment events
- name: All deployments
image: alpine
commands:
- echo "Running your deployment!"
ruleset:
event: [ deployment ]
# A step triggering deployment to a specific target.
# Targets can be any value i.e. dev, stage, eng, prod, etc
- name: Targeted deployments
image: alpine
commands:
- echo "Running deployment for ${VELA_DEPLOYMENT}!"
ruleset:
event: [ deployment ]
target: [ dev, eng ]
Usage
Let us look at an example workflow for executing a deployment on your repo. You should understand the following concepts before proceeding:
version: "1"
steps:
# A step triggering on "all" deployment events
- name: All deployments
image: alpine
commands:
- echo "Running your deployment!"
ruleset:
event: [ deployment ]
# A step triggering deployment to a specific target.
# Targets can be any value i.e. dev, stage, eng, prod, etc
- name: Targeted deployments
image: alpine
commands:
- echo "Running deployment for ${VELA_DEPLOYMENT}!"
ruleset:
event: [ deployment ]
target: [ dev, eng ]
# Now that we know how to control a deployment, lets look
# at adding custom parameters. Sometimes not only do you need
# control of the target but you want custom data available
# when your pipeline runs.
- name: Custom parameters deployments
image: alpine
commands:
- echo "Custom parameter message, ${DEPLOYMENT_PARAMETER_MESSAGE}"
ruleset:
event: [ deployment ]
target: [ dev, eng ]
The following CLI commands will trigger the pipeline and produce different permutations of the pipeline executing:
# Trigger deployment with no additional configuration
$ vela add deployment --org github --repo octocat
# Trigger deployment for a repository with a specific target environment.
$ vela add deployment --org github --repo octocat --target stage
# Add a deployment for a repository with two parameters.
$ vela add deployment --org github --repo octocat --parameter 'message=Hello, custom var!'