Artsy practices a sort of continuous delivery: builds are automated, and there is always a deployable version of the codebase. Thus commits form a pipeline:
- From developers’ working branches
- To the master branch
- Through a [hopefully successful] build
- Often to a staging environment
- Upon deploy, to the production environment
We have a number of tools to help us shepherd commits through this pipeline, but now that the number of apps and services we deploy has grown, sometimes things fall through the cracks. I just released a quick-and-dirty tool to help track how out-of-date different environments are: Releasecop.
Just list the different environments for each project (by git repo or branch name) in a manifest file, and the releasecop check command reports which commits have yet to be deployed to each environment. We set up a nightly Jenkins task to email us the results.