What are Continuous Delivery Rules?

Continuous Delivery Rules in Gearset Pipelines are a framework that allows teams to automate actions across their pipeline.

Currently, you can automate these actions:

Forward promotions - promote feature pull requests as they progress through environments toward production.
Back promotions - promote pull requests as they are back-propagated from production to earlier environments.

By setting up Continuous Delivery Rules for these actions, teams can automate the promotion of pull requests backward or forward once they have met the relevant criteria for promotion:

There are no merge conflicts or all conflicts have been resolved
Pull request validation has passed
Required deployment steps have been completed
Testing requirements have been satisfied
Branch protection policies and repository checks (reviews, approvals, or status checks) have been met

Automating these actions ensure that once everything meets your standards, Gearset takes care of the rest - keeping your pipeline moving and aligned without manual oversight.

Why use Continuous Delivery Rules?

Continuous Delivery Rules help developers, admins, and release managers save time by automating repetitive and predictable tasks within Gearset Pipelines.

By removing the need to manually move changes, teams can:

Eliminate manual overhead - No more waiting for someone to click Promote once checks have passed. Spend more time on high value work.
Ensure environment consistency - Ensures that all changes pass through the same checks and follow the same process. Automatically synchronize production changes back to earlier environments and parallel streams.
Increase release velocity - Accelerate delivery by removing friction between development and deployment. Once all conditions are met, promotions happen automatically, reducing delays and minimizing the risk of human error.
Maintain trust and compliance - Adhere to your branch protection policies, validation steps, code review and testing requirements before automating promotions.

Setting up Continuous Delivery Rules

Note: Your team needs an Automation Platform Enterprise license.

Continuous Delivery is only available on team-shared pipelines.

How to add a rule

Click Edit pipeline details... from the cog icon in your team-shared pipeline.

Navigate to the Continuous delivery section on the left-hand side.
Click Add rule to start creating your automations.

Select an action to automate

Choose whether the rule should automate forward-promotion or back-promotion pull requests.

Note: Sync PRs are not currently in scope for automation.

Name your rule

Give your rule a clear, descriptive name to make it easy to identify later. For example:

Forward Promotions to QA and UAT - for moving pull requests toward production.
Back Sync from Production - for synchronizing changes backward from production.

Clear naming conventions help teams manage multiple rules or complex pipelines.

Select environments

Choose the specific environments where your rule will operate. For example:

Forward promotions typically apply to intermediate environments like QA or UAT.
Back promotions synchronize production releases back to parallel integration environments, or hotfixes back to your testing environments.

Note: pull requests can not currently be automatically promoted to release environments (e.g. Production).

Set branch protection policy behavior

Branch protection behavior settings determine how Gearset interacts with your repository's branch protection policies during automation:

Apply branch protection rules (recommended) - Gearset respects all repository-level protections, including required reviews and status checks.
Skip branch protection rules - Gearset will disregard your required branch protections and merge anyway. This is typically used for back promotions or when earlier approvals and checks are sufficient.

Note: If you skip branch protection rules, your team-shared service connection will need the ability to override branch protection rules in your version control system.

Save your rule

After configuration, click Add rule. You can enable or disable the rule using the toggle switch, or edit and delete it from the menu. Ensure to Save the pipeline settings after.

Note: Existing pull requests in scope of the rules you’ve added will not be automatically promoted until something changes - such as a validation, merge conflict resolution, a review, a status check completion etc. - triggering reevaluation for automatic promotion.

Continuous Delivery in action

For each environment with a rule configured, Gearset displays information on the environment node and pull request panel about the rules set up.

You can view the status of each check for a pull request on the right hand side of the PR panel. Continuous Delivery only triggers when all checks are green, including:

No merge conflicts and successful validation
Testing and pre-deployment steps completed
All reviewer and status checks approved

When all criteria are satisfied, the automation runs and the pull request is automatically promoted to the next environment. If another rule exists for that environment and the PR clears all checks again, it will be promoted automatically there as well.

You can find the history for all automatic promotions in Recent promotion history. These will be marked as ‘merged by Gearset Continuous Delivery’. Gearset will leave a comment on the PR in your version control system too.