License requirements:
This feature is available to teams on the Automation Enterprise tier.
A Release Candidate is a group of features that are promoted together from the penultimate environment within a pipeline. They allow you to easily create and test the deployment of a release before it is deployed to production, helping to take the risk and uncertainty away from final production promotions.
How do these differ from the current Release functionality?
Without release candidates enabled, you are only able to create a release on the final environment in your pipeline. A release candidate can be created on a nominated penultimate environment instead. On promotion, this will propagate forwards as a single release pull request, appearing as a normal release in your production environment.
Other than this, release candidates provide all the same functionality as releases.
Who should use this feature?
If you regularly use releases to manage deployments to your production environment, and you have a production-like environment on which you do final testing of a release today, then creating a release candidate on this environment will give you a standardised way of creating, validating and deploying this as a single consistent package before it goes to production.
If the penultimate environment is a standard UAT environment, where significant testing occurs and changes to the final package are common, then we recommend promoting features individually and compiling the final release in Production using the releases functionality.
How do I enable Release Candidates in my pipeline?
In order to enable release candidate creation, you need to first choose which penultimate environment in your pipeline to use. If you click the cog icon on your pipeline screen and go into 'Edit pipeline details', this setting can be found within the 'Releases' tab.
You will then be able create a release within your nominated environment, just as you would have done at production.
The selected release candidate environment will show a new Release candidates tab which can be used (in the same way as the Releases tab on production) to add features to release candidates, schedule deployments and abandon a release candidate.
For more information on working with releases, see our Releases in pipelines documentation.
Can I change a Release Candidate after it's been promoted?
When you promote a Release Candidate onto your final environment in the pipeline it will appear just like a regular Release in the UI. You will be able to add features to it or abandon if necessary.
Abandoning a Release Candidate after it has been promoted to the final environment will cause pull requests for each individual feature to be opened on your final environment instead.