Can I Deploy?

Know when it’s safe to deploy with Pactflow

Before you deploy a new version of an application to a production environment, you need to know whether or not the version you're about to deploy is compatible with the versions of the other apps that already exist in that environment. The old-fashioned way of managing these dependencies involved deploying sets of pre-tested applications together, creating a bottleneck, and meaning that speedy development and testing on one application may be negated by slow development and testing on another.

The Pact way of managing these dependencies is to use the Pact "Matrix" and the can-i-deploy tool (read more). The CLI gives you the power of the matrix in your automation pipelines, allowing you to ask questions like "Can I deploy version 24 of the Foo application to production ?" and simplifying your deployment pipelines:

The CLI is great, however when it comes to diagnosing compatibility issues, or setting up the right queries to ask can-i-deploy when setting up your pipelines, a more exploratory environment would be preferable.

Introducing the Can I Deploy page

Today we are releasing a new Can I Deploy user interface (UI). This UI provides a rich query interface for the Matrix to ensure you can safely deploy your application, providing additional context not readily available via the CLI.

Sound good? Visit our docs to learn more and get started.

Why you’ll love this new UI

Accessibility and transparency:

• Brings can-i-deploy into the UI in an easier-to-digest format compared to CLI
• Non-frequent Pactflow users can get valuable information currently only available via CLI/APIs

Ease of debugging:

• Get detailed information about what failed and why
• Fix bugs faster with this detailed information and with it exposed to more of your team

How it works

The page helpfully pre-populates items such as your application and environment names to avoid common user errors:

The new page is the spiritual successor to the Matrix page in the Open Source Pact Broker (which we also made available via the Use old UI button), which has a crude user interface and is limited in its search criteria:

The new page provides all of the options available to the can-i-deploy tool, but provides a lot more context to help make sense of the data.

Available now - try it out!

The new Can I Deploy user interface is available to all users on any Pactflow plan. Visit our docs to learn more about the new page and how it works.