02-shipit

Ship-it! A gated CI pipeline with email notifications

The pattern of gated CI pipelines applies to cases when software release updates are required to be manually approved and triggered by a release manager or platform administrator before they get deployed to a protected environment (e.g. production).

This CI pipeline example illustrates the implementation of that pattern with a couple of additional enhancements on top of the previous simple gated pipeline sample :

• email notification to release manager about a release ready to ship/deploy
• monitoring of actual release deliveries of a software package in GitHub (Concourse FLY cli)

Sample pipeline

The pipeline definition file for the sample above is available here.

How to test it

To create the sample pipeline in your concourse server:

1. download file gated-pipeline-02-shipit.yml

2. edit the file and update the entries below:

   • YOUR-SENDER-EMAIL-GOES-HERE: replace it with your sender email address
   • [YOUR-EMAIL-GOES-HERE]: replace it with your destination email addresses separated by comma and keep the brackets

3. issue the following fly command:
   fly -t <your-concourse-alias> set-pipeline -p ship-it -c gated-pipeline-02-shipit.yml

Once the pipeline is unpaused in Concourse, it will:

1. Automatically execute its first two jobs (Build-It and Test-It) for every new release of the monitored repository

2. Notify via e-mail the release managers to review and take action in order to proceed with the deployment of the newly verified release

3. Proceed with the deployment execution only after the release manager manually triggers it (e.g. click on the Ship-It! job and then click on its + icon)

See also

• A more sophisticated gated pipeline