Promotion and Environments

The CD Pipelines of Jenkins X automate the promotion of version changes through each Environment which is configured with a promotion strategy property of Auto. By default the Staging environment uses automatic promotion and the Production environment uses Manual promotion.

To manually Promote a version of your application to an environment use the jx promote command.

jx promote --app myapp --version 1.2.3 --env production

The command waits for the promotion to complete, logging details of its progress. You can specify the timeout to wait for the promotion to complete via the --timeout argument.

e.g. to wait for 5 hours

jx promote  --app myapp --version 1.2.3 --env production --timeout 5h

You can use terms like 20m or 10h30m for the various duration expressions.

Feedback

If the commit comments reference issues (e.g. via the text fixes #123) then Jenkins X pipelines will generate release notes like those of the jx releases.

Also as the version with those new commits is promoted to Staging or Production you will get automated comments on each fixed issue that the issue is now available for review in the corresponding environment along with a link to the release notes and a link to the app running in that environment. e.g.

Promoting external apps

There may be apps that have already been released by other teams or companies who maybe don’t yet use Jenkins X and the applications are not already in your helm chart repository.

If you wish to search your helm repositories for an application to promote you can use the -f for filter option to find a chart to promote.

e.g. to find a redis chart to promote to staging you could do:

jx promote -f redis --env staging

For databases you may want to alias (via --alias) the name of the chart to be a logical name for the kind of database you need. As you may need multiple databases in the same environment for different microservices. e.g.

jx promote -f postgres --alias salesdb --env staging

If you cannot find the particular application you are looking for you may need to add a helm chart repository to your helm installation via:

helm repo add myrepo https://something.acme.com/charts/

for example to add the stable community charts:

helm repo add stable https://kubernetes-charts.storage.googleapis.com/
"stable" has been added to your repositories

to add the incubator community charts:

helm repo add incubator https://kubernetes-charts-incubator.storage.googleapis.com/
"incubator" has been added to your repositories

There are huge numbers of charts already created and maintained by the community these days. If you want to add your own apps developed outside of Jenkins X you just need to package the YAML as a helm chart and install it in a chart repository.

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