What license do I need to use this feature?
The use of Pre/Post Deployment Steps is tied to the Automation Starter, Teams, and Enterprise Add-on tiers.
Overview
Recently, we launched Pre and Post-Deployment Steps support within Gearset Pipelines. As part of the process of raising a pull request for some feature work, you can attach any manual steps required before or after its deployment to an environment within your Pipeline.
Often, there can be a pattern for these deployment steps, whereby there are common operations or reminders to complete tasks that are relevant to all PRs, or for specific PRs that make changes to certain types of metadata.
For instance, do you need to remember or let someone know when a deployment has happened? Or perhaps you have smoke tests that you currently need to manually start after a deployment. Such steps can be added to your library, and simply imported later when needed, rather than having to add them by hand each time.
Therefore, we've extended the deployment steps functionality to allow users to create a "library" of commonly required steps. These can be used as a basis to reduce the amount of repetition needed when raising pull requests for feature work within your Pipeline where deployment steps are necessary.
Creating your Deployment Steps library
You can create your library of deployment steps via the Edit pipeline modal, accessible from the cog icon next to the pipeline selection dropdown.
On opening the modal, you can select the Deployment steps tab, and from there you can add any commonly required pre and post-deployment Steps to your library under the Manage deployment step library section.
Adding a step can be done by clicking Add +, this will open another modal similar to the existing modal for adding a deployment step to a PR.
Note: You may notice that you cannot customise the "Environments to run against" for deployment steps added to your library. However, this can easily be done later when importing the step for a PR, by editing the imported step.
When all of the requisite steps have been added to your library, click Save on the bottom right of the edit modal to create it.
Managing your library
After creating your library for the first time, you can head back to the Edit pipeline modal to make changes to it, including adding to your library, deleting from it, and editing steps within the library.
Lastly, you can drag-and-drop items within the library to re-order them, perhaps ensuring that the most important or frequently required deployment steps within the library appear at the top.
Importing from your library
When raising a Pull Request after your library has been created, the Import steps buttons within the existing Deployment steps tab of the Create Pull Request dialog will become enabled.
On clicking either button, depending on which step type you are importing, a modal will appear to show all of the available steps from your library of that type.
You can select a subset of the deployment steps required for this Pull Request, or click Select all if all of them are necessary. Once you have made your selection, click Import to create a copy of each selected step from the library for your Pull Request.
After importing some steps, you will be able to edit or delete deployment steps that have been imported from your library. For instance, if you need to change the title to reflect a difference in name of some relevant metadata type, or if the step is only applicable against a subset of the environments within your pipeline.
To learn more about Pre and Post Deployment Steps within Gearset Pipelines, you can head over to our documentation.