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:

info

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:

Steps
- Image
- Commands
- Ruleset

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!'

Usage​

Usage