Approve manual actions

[rcollette]

From our master branch, we gate deployments from dev to qa and from qa to production with a manual job trigger. I would like to be able to execute these manual triggers from Alexa. Ex " promote project xyz"

Is there a way to do this currently with this app? If not does the GitLab API support execution of manual triggers such that this could be done reasonably from Alexa?. I would be willing to contribute.

[nfriend]

@rcollette I think this might be possible, depending on what you need.

Check out the Pipeline variables section of the README. If you can build your .gitlab-ci.yml in such a way that the "promote" jobs are regular jobs that only run when certain variables are populated, then I think it should be possible to do what you want with a job like this:

deploy_to_qa:
  script:
    - echo 'Deploying to qa....'
  only:
    variables:
      - $LAB_ASSISTANT && $LAB_ASSISTANT_TEST

This job would be triggered by a phrase like "Alexa, start a new test pipeline".

The caveat is that Lab Assistant always creates a new pipeline. It can't trigger manual jobs on existing pipelines. So I think this is unlikely to work for most projects that use trunk-based deployments, since this would always deploy the latest code to the target environment.

---

One other thought I had: if you are able to build a shell script that can perform the logic you want using the GitLab API, another approach is to have Alexa trigger a "dummy" job whose only job is to trigger the shell script, which then performs the logic you need.

[rcollette]

I would probably have to use the latter approach. But I'm starting to wonder if this will be sufficiently useful for me. Without notifications of a pipeline pending manual approval (as mentioned in my other issue), I would wind up having to be in gitlab to check status anyway. I definitely don't want my pipeline coupled to Alexa with special "announcement" jobs or scripting since on my team I may be the only team using it.

[nfriend]

@rcollette Makes sense! I agree the lack of notification support is a huge missing feature.