SilverStripe Platform approvals: approved

Last month, we saw a 95% deployment success rate on SilverStripe Platform (751/785 woo!). The platform has just got even better with the new approvals UI for deployments.

What is it and how does it work?

Great question! The approvals UI is the new way to handle deployments on SilverStripe Platform, which provides a better workflow for both queuing and approving deployments.

Step 1: Look at the shiny “New Deployment” button and fresh interface.

Step 2: Choose your release.

Step 3: Optionally, write a description of your deployment. This ties into the approval step coming up and is also a good way to let the rest of your team know a little bit about this release.

Step 4: APPROVALS! Workflows – everyone’s favorite topic.

Select a Release Manager or Stack Manager from the dropdown to request approval from. Selecting a user and then hitting "Send request" will send an email with details of the deployment (the information from step 3) to your chosen approver.

If you have sufficient permissions (like me!), you’ll see a "Bypass approval" button. A bypass can be used on UAT or test environments by any user, but is only available to users with “Deployer” or higher permissions for production deployments.

Step 5: Sit back and relax. Your deployment is now queued and awaits the lucky user who gets to hit “Start Deployment”.

If you exit the Deployment UI at the above stage, you can return to the deployments page at any time and you’ll see your queued deployments. Simply click on the “Approved” deployment to pick up from where you left off.

You can also read the full technical docs for this feature.

Cool feature, crew! Where do I sign up?

Glad you asked. In the upcoming release planned for Thursday 27th April, we will be rolling this out to all SilverStripe Platform stacks. Just hang tight and you’ll have this in no time.

If you’re feeling impatient and want to give us some feedback before the official go-live, feel free to contact us! If you are lucky, we may activate this on your stack straight away.

Header image by Marcel Burkhard.