Parameterized builds

We believe everyone can invent or already faced the need to occasionally perform some actions. For instance, run composer update when the vendor directory is not under VCS. It’s easy to get this done locally, but how to achieve this on CI server?

Meet the actions - list of Ansible tasks which will be executed on a build if commit message contains constructions with text between square brackets (like [test action1][test action2] Regular message).

Usage

Needed documentation is written directly inside of the playbook, so let’s take a look on a case with Composer.

Create scripts/tasks/composer-update.yml:

---
- name: Update Composer packages
  shell: composer update
  args:
    chdir: "{{ project_workspace }}"

Modify scripts/tasks/reinstall/pre-actions.yml or scripts/tasks/reinstall/post-actions.yml:

---
- include: ../tasks/composer-update.yml
  when: "'composer update' in actions"

That’s it. To run the action (parameterize the build), just create a commit with [composer update] in it’s message, like:

git add composer.lock composer.json
git commit -m '[composer update] Update Composer dependencies'
git push origin feature/XXX

You can handle as much as needed actions per commit, just write the handlers and don’t forget to specify their names in commit message.

Usage

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