Bamboo Branches

Question

I want to be able to build all of my three different environments (dev, staging and production). I'm not sure if I should be setting up three different plans or use branches. All three deployments are virtually the same with a few differences. The production build and deploy has a couple of extra steps in it that the other two don't have.

Each environment directly corresponds to a branch in our Mercurial repo. They would also trigger completely differently. I see that in the branching part of Bamboo I have the ability to change when each triggers but do I have the ability to disable tasks for a specific branch?

Our production plan should only ever get triggered manually. Part of my problem with the branching approach is that it seems really hard to tell what branch my plan is running for and I'd be really scared to go to manually build and deploy to dev and accidentally have it do the same to production.

Am I looking at this correctly? I imagine I am missing some fundamental ideas.

Brent Villalobo1 · Accepted Answer

I don't think branches is what you want.  The "virtually the same with a few differences" makes using branches very difficult.  If I understanding Bamboo branching correctly, the branches do the exact same work as the default branch except that it gets its source code from a different location.  So if you need to add different flags, extra steps, etc. then you're out of luck with branches.

Also, when you look at a project it only shows the status of the default branch and you have to dig deeper to see the status of the other branches.  So if you want people to see the status of dev, staging, and production builds from the project page, you don't want to use branches.