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
Gearset now supports pre and post-deployment steps in Pipelines. This allows you to add manual steps to a PR when you create it or while the PR is in progress. When adding pre- or post-deployment steps to a PR, you can associate those steps with any environment where they are needed.
Pre-deployment steps must be marked as complete before the PR can be merged in the Pipelines UI, while post-deployment steps will be highlighted for completion after the PR is merged and propagated to the next environment.
Adding pre/post deployment steps to your PR
You can add your deployment steps to your PR when creating it in the Pipelines UI or in any environment where the PR is awaiting promotion.
You will be able to enter the title of the step, additional details in the provided fields, and specify the environments where the steps should be applied.
Note: Markdown can be used here to add formatting to your description with headers, lists, sections, or embed more "rich" content like links and code blocks.
If you're unfamiliar with Markdown, you can see our guide for useful tips here.
All the steps will then appear in the specified environments when the PR is created.
You can also add your pre-/post-deployment steps to your PR directly in the Pipeline. Clicking Add step (highlighted in the image above) will bring up the same modal where you can add the step title, description and select the environments where the steps will appear with that PR.
Managing your pre-/post-deployment steps
Note: Parallel environments that point to the same branch will require the pre-deployment steps to be completed on both environments before promotion.
Your pre- and post-deployment steps are now attached to the PR. You will only be able to promote the PR once the linked pre-deployment steps have been completed.
Gearset will also append the name of the team member who marked the steps as complete to each step.
You can undo a completed step, edit the steps, or reorder a list of steps in any environment where they are located.
Once the PR is promoted, any pending post-deployment steps will appear in the Pending completion tab of your pipeline.
Gearset will also highlight any environment with uncompleted post-deployment steps in the UI by displaying a notification: "Some post-deployment steps haven't been completed".
The pending post-deployment steps will remain open in this tab until they have been marked as complete. The Pending completion tab will only appear when there are pending post-deployment steps in that environment.
Completed pre-deployment steps and pending or completed post-deployment steps can also be found on the promotion history page for each environment.
Releases
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.
Scheduled releases
You can schedule a release that has incomplete pre-deployment steps, but these must be completed before the scheduled deployment date, otherwise the release will not be deployed.
When you're scheduling a release deployment, but some pre- or post- deployment steps haven't been completed yet, you will see below message that serves as a reminder:
"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."
Long-term Projects
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.
Your Long-term Project PR will not be promotable until all of the pre-deployment steps associated with it are completed. Additionally, after successful promotion, if there are any post-deployment steps associated they will appear for completion in the Pending completion tab for a given environment.
Back propagation and developer sandbox updates
Pre- and post-deployment steps will also show up on back propagation PRs, with post-deployment steps showing up in the Pending completion tab.
Note: In regards to back propagation PRs, Gearset's default behavior is that all of the pre- and post-deployment steps show on these type of PRs.
Developer sandbox updates
Deployment steps will also be displayed for Dev Sandbox updates when bringing the latest changes back into your developer box.
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.
VCS and Ticketing Integration
When enabled in the pipeline preferences, you can record a living comment onto your VCS and/or Ticketing integration, like GitHub or Jira respectively.
This means that when any changes are made to a deployment step on a PR, the comment will be updated to reflect its current state.
