Promotion
When changes are merged to the main branch in the Jenkins X pipeline catalog a new versioned release is created (with a new image and helm chart). This new version is then promoted by creating Pull Requests on GitOps repositories.
How it works
The release pipelines use the [jx promote –all](https://github.
com/jenkins-x/jx-promote/blob/master/docs/cmd/jx-promote.md#jx-promote) command which creates Pull Requests on all
Environments configured in your jx-requirements.yml file and possibly .jx/gitops/source-config.yaml or
.jx/settings.yaml (see the Configuration).
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every environment which is defined as
promotionStrategyAuto or Manual is included in a Pull Request to promote the new version to that environment-
Auto means the Pull Request will automatically merge if its successful (the Pull Request pipeline succeeds)
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Manual means the Pull Request is a draft and won’t automatically merge. i.e. the Pull Request needs to be manually approved (comment
/approve) and taken off hold (comment/hold cancel).
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all local Environments of the promotion kind Auto are promoted using a single Pull Request so that all the promotions automatically merge if the pull request pipeline validates successfully.
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you can define multiple local or remote Environments for different system / integration testing environments.
Disable Promotion
If you want to disable promotion Pull Requests on an environment just remove the entry or configure the
promotionStrategy to be Never.
Reuse pull requests
By default a new pull request is created for each promotion. You can instead make existing open pull requests for promoting an application be reused.
Enabling reuse of pull requests for jx promote is done in jx-requirements.yaml by setting reusePullRequest to
true for an environment. It can also be done in the same way when configuring environments others ways. See
https://jenkins-x.io/v3/develop/environments/config/ for more details about configuring environments.
There are two main reasons why you would want to enable this:
To reduce conflicts: if a pull request is created before a previous pull request for upgrading the same application is
merged there will be a conflict when the earlier pull request is merged. Since enabling reuse means that jx promote won’t open more pull requests for an application this can’t happen.
The other reason is if you make use of the functionality to propagate application changelogs to cluster repositories. This is described in the blog post Improve your changelogs.
Synchronizing environments or namespaces
By default each release of each microservice creates a Pull Request to upgrade that specific microservice to a new version in each of your environments - e.g. Staging and Production.
When human approval is required in, say, Production you can end up with the drift between the 2 environments and want an easy way to bring them in sync.
The default with Jenkins X is for each new version of each microservice to be promoted immediately to Staging. You may want to test the combination of microservices together for a while beforethen choosing to promote changes to production and may want to do this in one atomic Pull Request and commit/merge.
If you wish to work in this way you can create a single Pull Request promoting all of the changes of apps between 2 environments or namespaces.
You can use the jx updatebot sync command to synchronise 2 environments or namespaces to reduce drift by creating a single Pull Request to add any missing applications or upgrade them.
# synchronizes the apps in 2 of your environments (local or remote)
jx updatebot sync --source-env staging --target-env production
This works whether the environments are separate namespaces within the same kubernetes cluster or you are using Multiple Cluster
Note that if you are using Multiple Clusters make sure your terminal is connected to the development cluster before running jx updatebot sync
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