Approval

How to pause pipelines for manual approval

The approval step allows you to pause a pipeline and wait for human intervention before going on.

Some example scenarios for using the approval step:

• Pause before deploying to production
• Pause before destroying an environment
• Pause for some manual smoke tests or metric collection

Usage

YAML

step_name:
  type: pending-approval
  title: Step Title
  description: Step description
  timeout:
    duration: 2
    finalState: approved
  when:
    branch:
      only: [ master ]

Fields

Pausing the pipeline

Once the pipeline reaches an approval step it will stop. At this point it does not consume any resources. In the Codefresh UI you will see the Approve/Reject buttons.

Once you click any of them the pipeline will continue. Further steps in the pipeline can be enabled/disabled according to the approval result.

Automatic approvals/rejections

By default, a pipeline that contains an approval step will pause for ever onces it reaches that step. If you want some automatic action to happen after a specified time period you can defined it in advance with the timeout property:

codefresh.yml

version: '1.0'
steps:
 waitForInputBeforeProduction:
   type: pending-approval
   title: Deploy to Production?
   timeout:
     duration: 2
     finalState: denied

This pipeline will wait for approval for two hours. If somebody approves it, it will continue. If nothing happens after two hours the approval step will be automatically rejected.

Approval Restrictions

By default, any Codefresh user can approve any pipeline that is paused at the approval state. If you want to restrict the approval action to a subset of people, you can use the Access Control facilities that Codefresh provides.

This is a two-step process. First you need to tag your pipeline with one or more tags (tag names are arbitrary). You can edit tags in the pipeline settings screen.

Once you have tagged your pipelines you can create one or more access rules that restrict approval to specific teams within your organization.

For more details on access control and users see also the account management page.

Getting the approval result

As also explained in step dependencies all steps in the Codefresh pipeline belong to a global object called steps (indexed by name). You can read the result property for an approval step to see if it was approved or rejected.

Here is an example:

codefresh.yml

version: '1.0'
steps:
 askForPermission:
   type: pending-approval
   title: Destroy QA environment?
 destroyQaEnvNow:
   image: alpine:3.8
   title: Destroying env
   commands:
   - echo "Destroy command running"
   when:
     steps:
     - name: askForPermission
       on:
       - approved

In this example the second step that is destroying an environment will only run if the user approves the first step. In case of rejection the second step will be skipped.

You can follow the same pattern for running steps when an approval step was rejected. Here is a full example with both cases.

codefresh.yml

version: '1.0'
stages:
- prepare
- yesPleaseDo
- noDont

steps:
 step_1:
   image: alpine:3.8
   title: building chart
   stage: prepare
   commands:
   - echo "prepare"
 deployToProdNow:
   fail_fast: false
   type: pending-approval
   title: Should we deploy to prod
   stage: prepare
 step_2:
   image: alpine:3.8
   title: prepare environment
   stage: yesPleaseDo
   commands:
   - echo "world"
   when:
     steps:
     - name: deployToProdNow
       on:
       - approved
 step_3:
   image: alpine:3.8
   title: deploy to production
   stage: yesPleaseDo
   commands:
   - echo "world"
   when:
     steps:
     - name: deployToProdNow
       on:
       - approved
 step_4:
   image: alpine:3.8
   title: prepare environment
   stage: noDont
   commands:
   - echo "world"
   when:
     steps:
     - name: deployToProdNow
       on:
       - denied
 step_5:
   image: alpine:3.8
   title: deploy to staging
   stage: noDont
   commands:
   - echo "world"
   when:
     steps:
     - name: deployToProdNow
       on:
       - denied         

Here is the pipeline state after a rejection:

You can see that only two steps were ignored. If you rerun the pipeline and approve it, the other two steps will be ignored.

Slack integration

If you also enable Slack integration in Codefresh you will have the choice of approving/rejecting a pipeline via a Slack channel

To enable this behavior, you need to activate it in the Slack settings page:

Also, if you run a pipeline manually that includes an approval step you should check the “Report notification of pipeline execution” checkbox as explained in Monitoring Pipelines.

What to read next

• Post-Step Operations
• Advanced Workflows
• Conditional Execution of Steps
• Creating pipelines