Feature: ability to use current branch as material

[technicallyfeasible]

I would like to request a feature.

Background

When creating a feature branch, I would like to setup additional pipelines to build this feature branch before it is merged. This way changes can be previewed by other developers for larger changes.

Implementation

A material is defined like this in build.pipeline.json:

    {
      "url": "git@bitbucket.org:company/my-repo.git",
      "branch": "develop",
      "type": "git"
    }

I would like to be able to insert the current branch here so this build works for any branch I specify in the config:

    {
      "url": "git@bitbucket.org:company/my-repo.git",
      "branch": "{{CURRENT_BRANCH}}",
      "type": "git"
    }

The placeholder {{CURRENT_BRANCH}} would be replaced with the value in the config xml when the plugin is loading the config into GoCD.

    <config-repo pluginId="json.config.plugin" id="my-repo">
      <git url="git@bitbucket.org:company/my-repo.git" branch="my-feature-branch" />
    </config-repo>

In this case:

{{CURRENT_BRANCH}} => my-feature-branch

[tomzo]

Hi,

Have you looked at configrepo material type? It might help a bit.

I understand your use case, but I don't know what workflow do you suggest for this.
For branch to be built both on master and feature branch, you would need 2 separate definitions in config-repos sections. E.g.

 <config-repo pluginId="json.config.plugin" id="my-repo">
      <git url="git@bitbucket.org:company/my-repo.git" branch="master" />
 </config-repo>
 <config-repo pluginId="json.config.plugin" id="my-repo">
      <git url="git@bitbucket.org:company/my-repo.git" branch="my-feature-branch" />
 </config-repo>

But when both are defined, then pipelines (with same name) will be duplicated and that is invalid configuration.
For a complete support of feature branches, building PRs, etc. that requires integration with something like github poller, but that requires at least to implement parameters support for configrepos on GoCD side.

[technicallyfeasible]

Oh great, I missed the configrepo feature. I think that works for my usecase. I understand I'd have to add both sections in the config xml which is not great but doable. Don't think there is another way apart from a deeper integration with bitbucket or github.

Probably a lot more work but if it was possible to automatically load open pull requests from bitbucket and create pipelines based on those feature branches that would be awesome. This could be turned on using a flag in the config-repo definition.

I haven't fully thought this through though and will experiment with configrepo for now.

[technicallyfeasible]

Missed one part in your comment, you are right that the names will be duplicated so some way to include the branch name as a variable would be needed.

  "name": "my-pipeline-{{configrepo:branch}}",