This article explains how existing pre- and post-deployment steps behave as work moves through releases, Long-term Projects, back propagation, developer sandbox updates, and connected tools.

To learn how to create and manage deployment steps on a pull request, see Pre and Post Deployment Steps in Gearset Pipelines.

When a pull request (PR) is included in a release, its deployment steps are automatically added to the release.

These steps will appear in the release sidebar, organized by feature. You can edit them just like you would for an individual PR, and you can also add deployment steps directly to the release.

If any pre-deployment steps are incomplete, the release cannot be deployed until they are all finished.

After deployment, post-deployment steps for each PR will appear separately in the Pending completion tab.

You can schedule a release with incomplete pre-deployment steps. However, all pre-deployment steps must be completed before the scheduled deployment time. Otherwise, Gearset won’t deploy the release.

Gearset displays the following reminder when you schedule the release:​
"You still have [number] pre-deployment step(s) to finish. If they're not marked completed before the scheduled release time, the release won't happen."

Similarly to Feature and Release Pull Requests, you can attach pre and post-deployment steps to a Long-term Project Pull Request when integrating the project work back into your main pipeline.

At the point of creating the PR, you can navigate to the Deployment Steps tab, adding your steps there. Alternatively, deployment steps can be added to an existing Long-term Project PR when it is selected on the pipeline screen.

A Long-term Project pull request can’t be promoted until all its pre-deployment steps are complete. After a successful promotion, any incomplete post-deployment steps appear in the environment’s Pending completion tab.

Pre- and post-deployment steps will also show up on back propagation PRs, with post-deployment steps showing up in the Pending completion tab.

Deployment steps also appear when you update a developer sandbox with the latest changes from the base branch.

This works slightly differently from how the steps appear on a PR, as you just need to check a single 'Mark all steps as complete' checkbox in order to proceed.

Similarly, the post-deployment steps will be shown in a 'Pending completion' tab and again, you can select many PRs and mark their post steps as complete in one go.

Developer sandbox updates only include steps set to All environments. Steps targeted at specific environments, such as a step set to run against Production only, don't appear on developer sandbox updates. This applies to both pre-deployment steps and post-deployment steps in the Pending completion tab.

When enabled in the pipeline preferences, Gearset can record a living comment against your pull requests and any linked Jira tickets. Whenever a deployment step changes, the comment is updated to reflect its current state.

Recording is controlled by two toggles under Edit pipeline > Deployment steps:

Both comments list every pre- and post-deployment step with its current status, along with the time and the team member for any steps already completed.

On the pull request:

The comment on a Jira ticket also includes a View deployment steps in Gearset link, so the steps can be reached without navigating back through the pipeline. Where the link points depends on the state of the PR:

On the linked Jira ticket: