Why do my plan branches disappear?

Mike Newton

Hi, I have setup and starting toying with plan branches. 

Currently I have automatic deletion disabled in my plan. And my match name is "release/.*", which is working ok, plan branches are being created and they build and it's lovely.

My problem is that when I come into ork the next day the plan branches are gone... I can't figure out why? I would like them to remain around for the lifetime of the branch. Our version is 5.14.3.1 build 51216

Many Thanks!

Mike

Jeyanthan I

From your input, it sounds like you stumbled onto this bug: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BAM-16341

The theory is that the plan branch you are referring to has probably been removed in the past as part of the plan branch cleanup process in Bamboo and you are now trying to re-create it, but there's a problem with doing this: when the plan branch is removed as part of the expiry process, Bamboo populates the DETECTED_DELETION_DATE column in the VCS_BRANCH table in the database with the date from the first time it got removed. That information is NOT erased when you re-create the plan branch, so next time the plan branch expiry process kicks in, it looks at that table and thinks that this plan branch should've been removed already, so it removes the branch (because it thinks it's doing the right thing).

The Workaround section from the bug report explains how to delete the DETECTED_DELETION_DATE data directly from the database for a particular plan branch, so that you can prevent it from being deleted again. I know this is not a feasible option to do every time.

Thus, to prevent this from happening, we recommend users to uncheck the "Clean up plan branch automatically" option when manually creating the plan branch in Bamboo (as mentioned by one of the users in this comment) until the bug is fixed. This way, the plan branch won't get removed as part of the expiry process anymore.

Hope it helps.