Promotion

How Apps are Promoted across Environments

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 command which creates Pull Requests on all Environments conigured in your jx-requirements.yml file (see the Configuration)

  • every environment which is defined in jx-requirements.yml as promotionStrategy Auto 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)

    • 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).

  • all local Environments in your jx-requirements.yml 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.

  • you can define multiple local or remote Environments for different system / integration testing environments.

Changing Promotion

If you want to disable promotion Pull Requests on an environment just remove the entry in jx-requirements.yml or configure the promotionStrategy to be Never

If you want your application to promote to different environments to the defaults for your cluster you can always modify your pipeline and change the promote step to use different jx promote arguments; e.g. pass in the explicit environments or repositories you want to promote to in the pipeline step.

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


Last modified May 8, 2021: fix: add docs on sync (e9719dbefe)