CI/CD pipelines Azure devops automatic merge after deploy release

Question

I have a classic env. setup like following:

I have 2 branches : Develop and Master.

Is there any way in azure devops to setup the following rule:

1. When a deploy is succeeded on dev environment (defined in the release pipeline of azure devops) ------> create automatically a pull request to merge develop into Master.

2. or the other one: if a Build of develop branch is succeded -------> create automatically a pull request to merge develop into Master.

Any help will be appreciated.

Solution 1

A few questions so I can better understand your use case:

• How often would this deployment/build of yours be run?
• Will there ever be any changes going into Master that do not come from develop?

If you plan to run this deploy/build which would create a PR to merge to Master for each change in develop, then I would recommend to delete the develop branch and instead develop directly against Master. Configure Master with Branch Policies enabled that would run a gated build (compile/unit test) before the PR can be merged. This is what my team has been doing for a while now with great success. This change in workflow would prevent the need for having a deploy/build which automatically creates a PR.

If you plan to run this deploy/build less frequently than every change, then I would recommend to use the VSTS APIs and a custom scripting task to automatically create a PR. I believe the scripting task would be fairly similar regardless of whether a deploy runs it or the build runs it. The documentation for VSTS APIs is fairly comprehensive, and I use several of them as part of our pipeline workflows (I use PowerShell). Here is documentation to Create a Pull Request. This would be run as the last task in the deploy/build.

If you plan to merge to Master from areas other than the develop branch, I just want to call out that the PR which will be automatically created by deploy/build could have conflicts and require manual intervention.

Solution 2

I would look into Azure Functions. Create a gate trigger and enable azure function after a successful release.

References: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/repos/git/create-pr-status-server-with-azure-functions?view=azure-devops

Comments

[Pat Long - Munkii Yebee]

Would you run any tests more involved than just unit tests in that "Gated Build" that was configured by Branch Policies? Such as some automated browser testing of a deployment? The OPs original scenario didn't move to MASTER until a deployment was successful rather than just a CI build