GoCD pull from multiple branches and deploy to different environments

[Moisés Belchín]

Hi,

I'm right now using GoCD for automate our deployments. 

These are the versions I'm using.

    go-agent  17.10.0-5380
    go-server 17.10.0-5380

I'd like to expose a case that I wasn't able to fix just by configuring GoCD, I couldn't find anything that can help me out on that, most likely I'm missing something ;-)

Here's the case I'd like to achive:

We have a GIT repository: `frontend-app`

In that repo every developer can push changes to different branches following this naming convention: `dev-1`, `dev-2`, ...

The goal to achieve is that every time a developer pushes changes to `dev-1`, goCD will take those changes in that branch, build it and deploy to our environment `dev-1`.

If developer 2 pushes changes to `dev-2`, goCD will take those changes, build them and deploy to `dev-2` environment.

The first I've tried, to achieve this, is configure the pipeline using only 1 material and try to use some glob pattern on branch names. As you can see in the attached screenshot.

However I couldn't get this working.

The second thing I tried is to use multiple materials. To be able to have multiple materials you need to configure the material giving to it a specific Destination directory. As you can see in the attached screenshot:

With this approach I was able to have goCD pulling for new changes and checking repo out on the specific Destination directory.

For my pipeline I have configured a template with a bunch of tasks to build the project, before deploying it, ie: `npm install`, `npm test`, `npm run-script build`, etc...

However, those tasks are then executed on the parent directory (`go-agent/pipelines/frontend-app/`), instead of in the Destination directory (dev-1, dev-2, ...)

    go-agent/pipelines/frontend-app/

      |_ dev-1

      |_ dev-2

      |_ ...

I've been reading about goCD environment variables and I couldn't find any variable that holds the destination directory, so I could reference it in my tasks.

Of course, as a solution, you can always create several pipelines in order to achieve this, ie:

frontend-app-dev-1, frontend-app-dev-2, etc...

But my problem is that I have 8 dev environments and also 10 projects. So as you can imagine is quite a job to configure all those things separately.

Specially if later we make any change, that's a lot of work to do it manually and prone to errors.

So my questions are:

 1. in case the first approach (branch glob pattern), can this goal be achieved by using Branch glob pattern ?

 2. if we use second approach (several materials), Does someone know if this can be achieved ? I think I'm almost there, but probably I'm missing something when configuring my tasks.

 3. Any other ideas to be able to get this working ?

 4. Is there any other way to achieve the things I need ?

Thanks in advance.

[Chris Flynn]

Is the code different per environment? I ask, because I think your build and deploy activities should be separate. Builds should create artifacts and put them on a shelf (or artifact repo). Then the deployment job should be able to select whichever version of the artifact it wants to deploy to any environment.

Is this a situation where you would want to define different environments in GoCD to contain the specific environmental information? It would be a manual task every time you wanted a new environment to define the new environment and variables, but you could clone the pipelines into the new environment and keep all the changes in the environment variables without having to change any of the tasks.

I definitely see where you are coming from though, I would love to have GoCD automatically recognize temporary feature branches to kick off automatic builds and run tests of the code prior to merging it back into master/develop.

For your 2nd approach, could you use relative paths? Especially since you are defining the child folder, I don't think you need to know the parent folder's full path.

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