Automatic plan-branching for multi-repository plans

[Per Samuelsson]

Hi,

We are evaluating Bamboo to see if we can use it as our CI-server and it seems like a really good product, and we like the plan branching feature in particular.

We have a multi-repository product (repos in Git) and we'd like to react to new branches on any of the repos to trigger our plan build. But it seems that automatic plan branching only happens for a single repository (the default one for the plan I guess)?

Can you share some light on this?

[PiotrA · Accepted solution]

Hello Per,

I think the best answer would be the link to https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BAM-11544 issue. I reckon that issue reflects exactly what you're looking for in Bamboo - consider 'voting' on that issue. The summary is that Bamboo can't yet plan-branch automatically over multi-repository plans.

regards,

[Per Samuelsson]

Hi Piotr,

Thanks for the quick reply!

OK, I see. Thanks for the link - now I have voted. Now that I know that it's not there yet, I'll try to come up with some other way of architecturing what we want.

Best regards,

[vagner]

Hi Piotr,

I don't think this question is related to https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BAM-11544 .

Let me explain :

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BAM-11544  is about checkouting on all the repositories the branch specified by the branch plan.

This is something we can easily workaround via a script that run git checkout on branch $bamboo_planRepository_branch in all our repo

But this question is about triggering a branch plan for all branch created on any repositories. And for now, it is only possible to have branch plan automatically triggered on the default repository. Is there a solution for that?

Thanks in advance

Regards,

Damien

[Deleted user]

> This is something we can easily workaround via a script that run git checkout on branch $bamboo_planRepository_branch in all our repo

That's a no-go for us because Bamboo won't be able to see the commits in those in order to generate a change log on the "Deployment projects > Releases" page. And we'd rather not write another script/plan for solely the change logs.

So I'd figured that the formal way to go when branching multiple repos is to use the "Download artifact" task. That will correctly fetch artifacts from dependent projects from the branch which the main plan has run from. However, there's also a showstopper then: Bamboo will refuse to generate changelogs across branches: 

> Comparison is available only for releases created from the same branch as this release.

This is the real limitation for us having dynamic branching and it's beyond me why it's not implemented in Bamboo (e.g. github has no problem of showing changelogs across different branches: https://help.github.com/articles/comparing-commits-across-time/#comparing-branches).

Having said all this, the only approach our team is left with is to modify plan settings to specify the branch which we want to checkout ~20 repos or so. We're still testing how this approach will work out for our team. But either way, at this point I couldn't disagree more with 

> we can use it as our CI-server and it seems like a really good product